Union, disunion, and reunion:

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HARVARD
COLLEGE
LIBRARY

Preservation facsimile

printed on alkaline/buffered paper

and bound by

Acnie Bookbinding

Charlestown, Massachusetts

2003

Sacbact CColteie I,tbcati

BRIGHT LEGACY.

Oae tuilf III* IncsiD* rrom Ihl* L«cin. vhicta mi
Rcdvcd <B iXa uder the will of

JONATHAN BROWN BRIGHT
■ of Waklum, UiuulBMtU, ti to b* (uptndMI for
beok* for the CoUegi UbruT. Thcothcrhalfof the
tnCDoH la damtad to tcholanhlpt in Hvrvd UdI-
TcrMjr fer the beneBt oTdeKanduiu of
HENRY BRIGHT, JR.,
who di«d *t WitertawD, Huudiuetti, la i6K la

•Ucible to the ichatinhipi. The will nqnlne thU

tuS UDnoBcenieBt ihnll be mad* In everj book added

to the Llbnry aader its prarliloiii.

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION ;

A LETTER
TO GENERAL FRANKLIN PIERCE,

EX-PRB8IDBNT OF THE UNITED STATES.

JOHN L. O'SUIiLIVAN,

Lin wHisTKR or tHi cKmD atAtia

LONDON :

RICHARD BEKTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET,

Unblii^i in ttibinacg to |!n Stajtriij.

U3 ^'V/JJ", ^

lokdom:
pbiimsd by b. clay, bon, aki> taylor,

BREAD BTBEBT BIfX.

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

I.

When we reflect upon the Civil War

b a twoon tho Nogthoji

0P0 9 Unitod S tutoos with all the incalculable evils

involved in those dread words, evils of which we do

not yet see the end ;

Upon the long complication of events and entangle-
ments of our politics, running back through forty
years^ which preceded and have resulted in them ;

Upon that state of opinion and feeling at the South
which had generated a growing Disunion party there,
and prepared the minds of the masses of the people
for it, when the occasion of culminating irritation
should arise ;

Upon that condition of opinions and of parties at
the North, on the other hand, which had not only led
it, in spite of manifold and unmistakeable warnings,

a2

4 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

to precipitate upon the country the very conjuncture
of circumstances which was to awaken into flame the
long smouldering revolution of the South ; but also,
after the outbreak, in ominous earnest, of that orga-
nized revolution by States, called Secession, frustrated
all the efforts for pacification and reconciliation which
were then urged upon the dominant party ;

Upon the marvellous indifierence with which we
have of late seen flung to the winds all the funda-
mental ideas of American liberty, once supposed sacred
and inviolable, such as freedom of the press, of speech,
of locomotion, without those passports which even
European despotisms are now discarding — immunity
of the citizen from arrest by mere executive authority,
and from domiciliary visits and seizures, independence
of the judiciary in the execution of habeas corptcs^ and,
finally, the inherent right of any and every great mass
of human population, large enough for independence,
to choose and change at will its form of government —
all cardinal ideas heretofore supposed to be involved
in Americanism ;

Upon the spectacle of over a million of men in
arms, for fratricidal war, sprung up as it were in a
night from the fields of a " model republic ; "

Upon a public debt already within a few months
run up to an amount exceeding in annual interest half
of the fabulous National Debt of England ;

Upon the South defying even the entrance of co-
lossal anti-slavery armies into its very cotton-fields,
and destroying the stocks of its precious agricultural

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 6

treasures, rather than submit to return into a Union
once so beloved, once so exulted in, for the common
national strength and dignity secured by it ;

And upon the North brought to the point of
threatening, through the fell resource of servile war,
utterly to ruin the South, but at the same time to
destroy one of the main foundations of its own indus-^
trial and commercial system ;

When we reflect, I say, upon all this bewildering
succession and combiniation of phenomena, which the
world beholds, amazed and aghast, we are forced to
admit, with astonishment, grief, and shame, that they
point to the existence, in our political system, of some
profound and before unsuspected defects, which have
brought it to mch a result in its practical tcorkifiy ;
some latent germs of evil co-existing with all its great
elements of good, and operating upon men and upon
parties, to inflame their passions, to distort their
judgment, to poison the springs of the national life,
in forms hitherto not well understood, or, at least, not
yet brought out into clear public light.

11,

When some magnificent architectural structure
crumbles in an instant into ruin ; when a railway
train crashes suddenly to destruction ; we know that
there were latent causes, in certain flaws or points of
weakness, which it then becomes of the first necessity
to discover before we can reconstruct. The great

6 UNION, DISUNION, AND RKUNION.

prin^ipl^ of instructive sdenoe, of which both were

it illustrations, have not lost their
truth, nor have the catastrophes shaken our faith in
them. So too our faith remains unshaken in the
broad fundamental principles of the American system.
Republican liberty ; popular self-government ; written
constitutions ; separation of the elements of political
power — ^legislative, executive, and judicial ; continental
confederation, the harmonizing of local self-government
with national union and collective power ; — ^these, the
great fundamental ideas of our system, remain still
and for ever true, in their adaptation to hmnan nature
and human society. Let us then investigate the flaws,
which brought about the catastrophe, with a view to
remedy and reconstruction. To attempt this is the
object of this humble effort.

III.

Whatever may be the mutual recriminations of
North and South, and our common confusion of
opinions, it is certain that no such state of things, on
80 grand a scale, involving millions of men in anta*
gonism of minds and of action, could ever have arisen
without more or less of mingled and entangled right
and wrong on all sides. Guilt and crime are indi-
vidual; millions are never wicked. The South has
believed itself wronged ; its very action as the weaker
of the two, its sacrifices endured and perils hazarded,
and that degree of unanimity which, though it may

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION^ 7

not be absolute, is still a substantial and undeniable
fact, suffice for the proof of this. The North, on the
other hand, with at least equal intensity of feeling,
displays the converse conviction. On both sides, good
and honesty Christian and tender-hearted, brave and
patriotic men, have gone into this tremendous conflict
with solemn appeals to God, and in the name of all
the most sacred principles of political truth and duty.
On both sides, the women embroider, and the ministers
of religion bless, the banners which are to lead their
fellow-creatures to slaughter.* The best virtues of man
have contributed, on both sides, even more than the
worse impulses of his nature, to bring our common
country to this fearful pass ; and they now constitute

* The following was the form of prayer read in the varioua
churches of all denominations throughout the Confederate States on
the Fast-day, November 15th ; in the Jewish synagogues the name
of Christ being omitted : —

« Almighty God, the Sovereign Disposer of events, it hath pleased
Thee to protect and defend the Confederate States hitherto in their
conflicts with their enemies, and be unto them a shield.

'< With grateful hearts we recognise Thy Hand, and acknowledge
that not unto us but unto Thee belongeth the victory ; and in
humble dependence upon Thy almighty strength, and trusting in
the justness of our cause, we appeal to Thee that it may please Thee
to set at nought the efforts of all our enemies, and put them to
confusion and shame.

*' Oh, Almighty God, we pray Thee that it may please Thee to
grant us Thy blessing upon our arms, and give us victory over all
our enemies, whoever they may be.

** Preserve our homes and altars from pollution, and secure to us
the restoration of peace and prosperity ; all of which we ask in the
name of Jesus Christ our Blessed Lord and Saviour, to whom, with
Thee the Father, and the Holy Spirit, we will give all the praise
and glory in time and throughout all eternity. Amen and Amen."

8 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

the most difficult obstacle, to extrication from it.
Each, blind to the ppopogolio S' of truth on the anta-
gonistic side, of error on their oyn, believe themselves
to be fighting God's baftJ^iana Sathe diflferent sides
of the same fields of fratricide flow twin streams of
the noblest human blood, both freely shed in the
highest spirit of patriot heroism.

In the first executive order of the Secretary of War,
" by order of the President," of February 14th, 1862,
the war was truly described as " based on a conflict of
ideas'' That very phrase involves all that has been
here said. It implies antagonism of convictions, and
of consequent supreme duties difierently understood.
Let us put ourselves for a moment, whatever may be
our particular opinions, successively in the opposite
positions of the two contending parties in this great
strife, both our countrymen, both our brethren, both
joint heirs with ourselves, and with each other in the
sacred memories of the Revolution, and in the revered
name of Washington.

IV.

On the one side, the Federal soldier, (even when not
belonging to that class whose humanitarian sympathies
are inflamed by the slavery of a race regarded by them
as natural equals in the capacity for liberty and con-
sequent right to it,) looks upon the adverse array as
that of wicked treason, unparalleled since that of the
rebel angels, and aiming at the overthrow of the best.

UMON) DISUNION^ AND REUNION. 9

the freei^t and most beneficent of human governments,
past, existing, or possible. He holds it unjustifiable
by any provocation. He considers that a selfish and
arrogant ambition alone has prompted the leaders of
a factious minority in the State, after they had seen
power pass out of their hands, through the naturally
and fairly acquired preponderance of the North in
population and wealth, to revolt against the govern-
ment they could no longer rule, with a view to reign
supreme in their own section, raised by revolution
into a nation. He argues the doctrine of Secession
to b& one incompatible with any future cohesion of
nationality, or any possibility of government ; as well
as a violation of the moral faith which in all republics
must bind minorities to submission to the will of
majorities, fairly expressed, through the covenanted
forms, and modes of election and legislation. Arguing
that the Constitution was adopted by the whole people
collectively for the creation of a nation, he feels the
sacredness of the highest kind of patriotic loyalty to
rest on his cause, of fidelity to the beloved old fiag of
the country, to all the oaths ever sworn to the consti-
tution, to the memories of its great authors, to the
numberless posterity, which, under its broad and
sublime aegis, was to have developed, for the blessing
and imitation of the human race, the grandest and
happiest civilization ever yet witnessed on the face of
the globe. No higher nor holier motives ever nerved
the arm of man in war, or glorified the hour of
martyrdom.

10 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION*

V.

On the other side, the Confederate regards the
Constitution as having been virtually cancelled by
Northern violation of the compact of union, of which
it was the instrument; considers that, according to
Mr. Webster's own words, " a bargain broken on one
side is broken on all." Educated in the principles
of the " State Rights " theory, as expressed in the
Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1797 and 1798,
uniyei*sally accepted by the South, and also long
recognised as the political creed of the generally
dominant party of the North, he holds the constitution
to be, in its nature, and by virtue of the separate
sovereign acts of accession of the successive States, a
compact of confederation, and as such morally obli-
gatory on the one side, so long only as faithfully
observed, in spirit as well as in letter, on the other.
When thus violated, he holds the original parties to
the compact to be necessarily relegated to their ante-
cedent sovereignty, a sovereignty never abandoned
except on the points stipulated in the compact; in
regard to which points it was only suspended by
delegation, to revive in full force, and by indefeasible
right, on the expiration of the compact, whether
through consent of both sides, or through wrongful
violation by either. He believes that case to have
now actually arisen. He believes the Federal power
to have been, in fact, long abused, through a system
of unequal taxation • for the benefit of a sectional

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 1 1

maDufacturing and mineral interest, to the unjiist
oppression of his purely agricultural section ; a system
through which the South has long complained that it
was made to pay, in the form of enhanced prices,
at least fifty millions of dollars a year, to swell the
manufacturing profits of the North, and has been
gradually alienated in heart from the Union, under
which it saw maintained such a violation of the spirit
of the constitution. In the actual legislation of many
of the Northern States for the frustration of the pledge
in regard to fugitive slaves, he sees a violation, open,
flagrant, and defiant, at once of its spirit and letter.
In regard to his right of migration, with his accus-
tomed domestic and social system and property, into
the Territories, he sees further a scornful and insulting
violation by the North of his constitutional rights,
as they existed, not only in his own conviction, but
also by the solemn decision of the Supreme Court,
the recognised arbiter of disputed questions of con-
stitutional law and right.

In the policy thus proclaimed by the North, he
sees himself not only excluded from any portion of
the common territories of the Union; but also his
section doomed, by arithmetical necessity, to such an
accumulation of the rapidly growing black race
within its existing limits as must result in an in-
tolerable preponderance of numbers on the part
of that race, with their eventual compulsory eman-
cipation, and finally in the abandonment of the
soil by the whites. He sees the Abolitionist element

12 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

in the Northern opinion to have gradually risen and
spread, from a small and despised beginning, until at last
the whole North has seemed to have become so widely
permeated by it, so strongly imbued with its spirit,
that a great exclusively anti-Southern party has formed
itself on Abolition as its peculiar and engrossing idea,
and has projected^ne Pr^side^ial , campaign after
another on that rovotuwo^arj^M success all

but attained on the first attempt ; with complete and
sweeping triumph in every Northern State on the
second, in 1860. He sees that party embodied in a
President and Secretary of State, the joint authors of
that fatal phrase, the " irrepressible conflict," which
involves the permanent menace of the destruction of
slavery, to be brought about sooner or later, by means
more or less direct, through the ascendency of the
North in the, Federal Government. He has heard Mr.
Seward, the representative man of that party, address
his Northern audiences with the ominous words :
'^ Slavery must be abolished, and you and I must do
it." He sees the bulk of the prominent representatives
of that party in Congress, to the number of sixty-eight,
including that same Mr. Seward, endorsing and re-
commending for circulation, as a party document, a
work replete with every exasperating insult, scoffing
scorn, and even bloody menace to the South, and
declaring that " our purpose is as fixed as the eternal
pillars of heaven; we have determined to abolish
slavery, and, so help us God, abolish it we will." He
sees not a few of the influential organs of that party

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 13

expressing an andisguised sympathy with the fell and
fatal fanaticism of John Brown ; and a governor
elected in the leading State of New England, who had
presided at bis apotheosis.

Already, in the Chicago plan of arresting or hem-
ming in the natural growth of the slaves, he sees the
first step towards the accomplishment of this threat-
ened destruction of slavery through the power of the
Federal Government, in a mode, not indeed immediate
and direct, but both sure and fatal, like that French
method of destroying a hostile Algerian tribe, not by
direct attack, but by suffocation in a cave whose
entrance is closed with burning brushwood. In all
this he sees the Federal Government transformed from
its original character, as the central power of a fraternal
confederation of States, equal in dignity and in rights,
into a political machinery for the domination of the
weaker by the stronger of the two sections ; a domi-
nation openly exercised under the mere letter, but in
direct contravention of the spirit of the Constitution,
on a principle not only profoundly insulting to all the
national sentiment of the South, and contemptuous of
its strongest convictions, but directly tending, and
avowedly aimed towards a result destructive of the
whole social system of the South. In all this he
sees, as abeady said, a virtual abrogation of the com-
pact of the Constitution, superadded to those other
minor violations of its spirit and letter of which long
before he had been loudly and bitterly complaining;
injury culminating in insult, and crowned with
menace — ^menace of most fatal bearing, all uncon-

14 UHIOH, DismnoH, aud bcuhiok.

stitutional, all intderable, and aD incompatible with
peaceful co-existenoe in the same confedoation. As
the brave and high-spirited White Man of the Sonth,
he feels himself therefore to possess a far stronger caae
for rightfol separation from a mere Confederate nnkm
with the North, whether r^arded as reyolation <nr as
legitimate secession, than existed in all the com-
paratively petty grievances which prompted and
justified the original separation of the colonies from
the mother country. That point reached, and reached
sincerely according to his profoundest conviction, he
sees in the subsequent invasion of the South for its
subjugation, under the form of restoration (tf the Union,
nothing but a wanton, cruel and unrighteous invasion
for the enforcement of an aUen, usurpatory and detested
tyranny ; an invasion in itself subversive of the once
fundamental American idea of the right of self-govern-
ment, and inherent sovereignty of the mass of any
people large and strong enough for independent
nationality* He therefore, on his side too, fights the
battle of self-defence in all the spirit of the War of
the Bevolution, for rightful independence, for freedom
from a hated yoke, for the protection of home, hearth,
and country, for the dignity of humanity, and for the
existence of his race.

VI.

The opposite points of view of the two sides have
here been fairly stated, without any attempt to con-
fute whatever may be erroneous or exaggerated in

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 15

either. However blind each side may be, in the
passionate madness that rules the hour, to the sin-
cerity of the converse convictions of the other;
however I may be charged by either with colouring
too favourably the opposite case ; this is, to my best
ability, the truth of the present page of history. It
is, indeed, the mere elaboration into detail of all that
is more succinctly signified by Mr. Lincoln's own
'^ con/lid of ideas.'* As honest, as sincere, as gene-
rous, as self-sacrificing, as are the patriots on the one
side of this most dreadful and most absurd of wars
ever yet vritnessed by the world, so are they alike
and equally on the other. And this is the worst
feature of the whole case; for on neither side are
Americans (the proudest and most self-governing of
men, while inferior in bravery to none that have ever
lived, when anipiated by such convictions and such
motives) either easy to conquer, or easy to be kept
long in subjection, even if for a time overpowered.

If, then, we would indulge a hope of ever really
reconstituting the Union, with any thought to its
future permanence, we must find some means of
putting an end to this fatally honest ''conflict of
ideas ; " and of so amending our political system as
to remove from it those elements in which we can
trace the causes whose operation has culminated in
this result.

Those elements, while distinct, yet work together,
blending their reciprocal influences, and the one
aggravating the pernicious action of the other, so that

1 UNfON, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

it may not always be easy to consider them separately.
Long familiar with the working as well as with the
theory of our politics, I make out those elements to
be, mainly, four in number, namely : —

1. The excess of the Party System and Party
Spirit, having its chief root in the enormous over-
growth of the federal Patronage.

2. The too great splendour and power, and too long
inflexibility of the Presidential office.

3. The indistinctness of the demarcation of the
limits of power between the Federal and the State
Governments ; an indistinctness resulting from that
antagonism of minds which existed among the framers
of the Constitution, and which was with difficulty
compromised under vague generalities of language in
the Constitution, with its supplementary amendments.

4. Proceeding out of the last-named germ of evil,
the Northern tendency to over-work and misapply the
central Federal power, in modes calculated to alienate
and exasperate the South, and fatal to the possibility
of permanent confederation after the growth of the
country to gi*eat dimensions of territory and numbers;
those modes having been chiefly through their pro-
tective policy, and their hostile interference with the
great social question of Slavery at the South.

I propose to consider these severally, though in
treating of one it will not always be possible to avoid
allusions to the combined influences of the others.

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 17

VII.

All history testifies that Party, while the necessary
condition, is the supreme danger of republics. In*
separable as Party is from freedom ; useful as, within
healthy limits, it is for promotion of pubUc discussion,
elucidation of truth, and restraint upon the abuses of
power ; yet, like fire, its excess is fatal. Like fire, too,
its tendency is to excess. Every influence calculated
to restrain that tendency, to preserve parties and party
spirit moderate, and, above all, pure and unselfishly
patriotic, ought to be earnestly cultivated ; everything
tending to increase, intensify, and demoralize them, to
be, as far as possible, reformed out of every republican
system, especially when constituted on a very large
scale of action.

In point of fact, on the contrary, everything with
us works as perniciously as possible in reference to
this object. Not only has our Federal Government
been so administered, heretofore, as to associate the
pecuniary interests of vast classes, and great sections,
with the ascendancy of parties, but also the enormous
excess to which has grown the vicious influence of
political Patronage, has come to identify the triumph
of Party with the personal pecuniary interests and
ambitions of too great and widely spread a number
of individuals. The too splendid prize of the Presi-
dency, acting on the imaginations of our great men,
and^acting similarly on those of the countless swarms

B

18 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

of lesser men, the too magnificent " scheme " of that
great lottery of Patronage whose wheel is in perpetual
rotation, with its grand national " drawing" every four
years, and its minor State ones annually, have gone
far, strong as is the element of patriotism in the
American character and tradition, and general as is
the difiusion of educated intelligence, to fever and to
vitiate our politics to a degree almost subversive of
the purposes of government — to a degree which has
led an ex-President, and a thoroughly pure and
honourable man, to say to me that "our Govern-
ment, though originally the purest, was fast becoming
one of the most corrupt on the face of the earth/*

All our elections are Presidential or quasi-Presiden-
tial. The former are always on hand, or approaching,
and the same organized parties contend in the latter
with reference to their indirect influence on the
former. Every candidate for village constable has
come to be the " Jackson " or the " Clay " candidate,
the " Lincoln " or the " Douglas," whatever may be
the combinations of the day in reference to that one
centrally supreme office, which is itself the great main-
spring of Patronage. All offices, great and small,
being removable (to say nothing of contracts and
other forms of profitable patronage), each is an object
to aspirants whose real number is never known, more
or less open, and more or less eager ; the triumph of
Party, and prominence in it hy activity and zeal,
being the one path to success. The vicissitudes of
business and of fortune incident to a fluctuating paper

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 19

currency, and highly elastic credit system, create
swarms of persons to whose necessities party politics
are the ready resource. Others, not similarly neces-
sitous, yet engaged for excitement and enjoyment at
the green table of the great national game, are little
less eager, as even rich gamblers like to live by the
stakes. To others again, under a system which makes
the attainment of office in itself a proof of prominence
and influence, in a country affording no other per-
sonal distinctions, the great stimulus of vanity comes
into play ; and the more effectually that the vanity is
well paid with simultaneous profit. When to the
Federal we add all the vast varieties of State and
Municipal Patronage, which, in the working of our
complex system, have been sucked into the wake of
the former, and then consider the enormous number of
aspirants, more or less open— and when we, further,
take into account their interested relatives and close
friends — ^we cannot estimate at less than half a million
the number of persons who may be said, apart from
patriotic interest in the best solution of the issues of
the day, to have a direct personal interest, whetted to
all the keenness of pecuniary craving, in the triumph
of Party.

Upon this, pile up still further the exciting influ-
ence, acting upon an excitable people, of contest in
any and every species of struggle or game between
man and man, mass and mass, from parading a
political fire-engine to manoeuvring a campaign for the
destinies of a continent — an influence stimulating all,

b2

20 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

for the mere pride of victory, to resort to all means,
short of the manifestly shameful, for its attainment,
and we shall begin to form some conception of what
the Party System and Party Spirit have grown to
among us.

The half-million or so, above indicated, take the
lead — work the locomotive; the rest must needs
follow in the train, in the great and perpetual race
with the rival line. They are the loud, the active,
the zealous, or at least the most so. Their breath or
their inspiration fills the ceaseless public trumpets of
the press, the " stump,'' and the tribune. They mould
and manage the organization of party machinery,
from the village or ward, up, up, through the
gradations of county and State committees and con-
ventions, till it finally culminates in the Presidential.
They virtually make the elections, by prescribing 4n
advance the party nominations, and constructing the
" platforms ;" and demagogue inwudggCCi threatening
mutinous '* bolt," or obscure noutrafiy , are often the
most effectual titles to selection.

All this goeO>etween the two rival parties, while
at the same time another natural offshoot from the
great tap-root of evil, Patronage, does not fail to
follow, namely, subdivision of parties into sub-parties
or factions, wheels within wheels, striving for that
local ascendancy which shall secure clique nominations,
and prior right, within the Party, in the distribution
of the present or future " spoils."

Patriotic sentiment, withal, is not wanting ; on the

UNION, DISUNION, AND KKUNION. 21

contrary, it is both strong and general. But confused
amid the universal din of public discussion, and the
natural self-delusions of interest and excitement, it
serves less to enlighten and inspire, than to add
another influence of stimulation; — all, meanwhile,
believing (at least up to the fatal year of 1861) that
no possible contingency of real danger could ever
approach those foundations of rock, on which rested
the grand structure of the common national prosperity
and greatness.

Out of all this has grown a never ceasing agitation
and intrigue, tendmg towards the one great object,
not the good of the Country, but the success of the
Party. The higher ambitions of leaders and the
minor aims of followers, with more or less of distinct
self-consciousness or of partial self-deception, have
thus all worked reciprocally together, to one common
and general vitiation of our politics ; with a constant
tendency of the management of the machinery of
party to fall into the most violent and unscrupulous
hands, locally absolute in influence, direction, and
control — not always inaccessible to actual corruption,
practicable upon occasional local leaders though im-
practicable upon the large masses of universal sufirage
— and, through the whole ramification of nominations
and consequent elections, giving to all the departments
of our Government more or * less of their own colour
and character.

During the past five and twenty years I have
studied very closely the working of our Party system.

22 UNION, DISUNION, AND BEUNION.

as well as the theory of our institutions — have parti-
cipated actively in it, on the local, as well as on the
national scale — have known in it many of the best
and noblest of men, and not a few of the worst and
meanest — have been in the most intimate relations
with Presidents and cabinets, as well as with the more
minute wheels of the vast and complex machinery —
have aided to dii'ect as much of its influence, and
enjoyed as much of its honours as I ever care to—
and I appeal to all intelligent Americans, whether the
above is not, substantially, a true picture, with nothing
extenuated, nought set down in malice.

VIIT.

One of our most profound as well as patriotic
statesmen — happily for himself spared the spectacle
of to-day — 1 will add, one of the most devoted friends
of the Union under the Constitution, the Constitution
understood in the sole sense compatible with its
durability, though many readers will smile sardonically
when I name Calhoun — said five and twenty years
ago that the Patronage of the Federal Government, if
not itself destroyed, would end by destroying the
Government. He added that I might live to see it,
though he should not. It has brought about the
catastrophe which he prophesied.

Patronage — and by that I mean the excess of Party
Spirit and the vitiation of the Party System which
have their main root in Patronage — was the funda-

. ^t

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 23

mental cause of those party feuds which led to the
division of the Democratic party in 1848 and 1860;
the irreconcilable conflicts of cliques, and ambitions of
leaders, becoming so embittered as to prefer present
common defeat, consoled with hope of ulterior ascend-
ancy, to concession to rival ambitions.

Patronage, through the relations created by it
between an administration and its party in Congress^
especially when that party is in majority there, has
gone far towards breaking down the wall of separation
intended by the Constitution between the executive
and the legislative powers ; and to pervert the healthy
action of the system in modes which I have no space
to follow out, but which will readily occur to the
memory of American readers.

Patronage makes a President the autocrat of his
party before its distribution, and the victim of its
malcontents afterwards; besides absorbing three-
fourths of that time and attention which he ought to
be free to devote to the far higher duties of his
quadrennial reign.

Patronage enables a corrupt intriguer, after reach-
ing the Presidency through the leverage of its pro-
spective dispensation, to foment those discords within
his own party, and those'aeiihor^ostility against for-
midable competitors, which may promise to bring it
to the period of the next nomination in such a state
of distraction as may compel it to re-nominate him, in
spite of hypocritical professions of nou-candidateship
with which he may before have sought to propitiate

24 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

other Presidential aspirants, and to gain moral
strength with the people — (superfluous to point with
a name the moral of this passage).

Patronage, in large degree, gave rise to that long-
continued ascendancy of the leaders of the South in
the Democratic party, which cannot be denied as a
fact ; which has contributed not a little to inflame an
impatient sectional jealousy at the North ; and which,
operating together with commimity of doctrine in
regard to State Rights, has laid us open to the charge,
with some truth and more exaggeration, of pro-slavery
sympathies.

Patronage brought the great Whig party, after its
final hopeless overthrow in 1852, to the fatal resort of
that aectionality, with a view to victory through con-
solidation of the majority North against the minority
South, which, taking the new name of amalgamated
" Republicanism," traced for the first time a broad
black line of geographical division of parties, in spite
of the warning of Washington's farewell address, and
of Jefierson's memorable "fire-bell in the night;"
and which, on the Philadelphia and Chicago platforms,
raised the ominous banner of Anti-Slavery, at all the
risk of the manifest peril to the Union involved in
that course — a peril unfortunately not believed in as
really possible !

Patronage, most powerful when all prospective,
defeated all the efforts for compromise which, after
the commencement of Secession in earnest, were
urged till many of us almost sweated blood ; because

DNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 25

effectual compromise involved concessions /a/o/ to the
cohesion of party, incompatible with a party platform,
and not consented to by a President and his chief
councillors, chained themselves by the party sjrstem to
the party platform ; from whom it was perhaps too
much to hope that they should give the signal for
the disbanding of a just victorious party by breaking
with a controlling wing of it, when the latter exacted
inflexible adherence to a position with which were
identified a fanatical idea of that wing, and the
common party existence and party future of the whole
associated body.

Had it not been for Patronage — by which I
repeat that I mean that excess of Party Spirit which
has its main root in Patronage — the series of events
which, through the vitiated political action of all sides,
has led up to Secession, would never have occurred ;
and after its commencement it would have been
arrested, easily arrested, by wise and timely com-
promise. Party carried the day over prudence and
patriotism, by blinding men's eyes to the fatal brink
to which, already in the rapids, we were aU then
swiftly borne along, through the working of a system ;
and by exciting them to prefer the disbelieved chance
of the supreme of evil to their country,* rather than

* The following is an extract from a letter from a Bepubliean
Senator at Washington, in response to a letter of appeal written when
it was already late in the day (January 19th), and when many efforts
had already broken down before the same insuperable obstacle. In
it is heard a sorrowful sigh of the prisoner in the chains of the party
system, which fettered the ability even of enlightened and well-

26 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

consent to those concessions, to politically hated
adversaries, which appeared to involve the dissolution
of a party. Well did Mr. Calhoun predict that the
Patronage of the Federal Government, if not reformed,
would destroy the Government itself. It has destroyed
it; — whether or not beyond recovery, is what yet
remains to be seen.

IX.

The remedy for this evil, at least, is simple and
easy. If Patronage has been the alcoholic stimulant
of ^ouTDolitici. not only used in enormous excess, but
baa m quality , the remedy is to suppress it, as far
as possible. The Confederate States have already
had the good sense to apply that remedy in their
amended Constitution. I hopb that fact will not
prove an obstacle to its adoption by the North, what-

disposed men to save their country in its hour of supreme need. If
this should ever meet the eye of its writer, he will forgive this use
of a ^ private" letter, on the assurance that its authorship remains,
and will ever remain, confidential : ^Indeed, I have come to despair
of saving the Union. One month ago, it might have been done. I
fear it is now too late. The only question is how the seceded States
shall be treated. Could the true policy be adopted, they might be
brought back, ultimately. But I apprehend that incredulity, obsti-
nacy, and every form of utter and astonishing folly will complete the
work of destruction which has been so thoroughly begun." Very
true, and very sage, and very sad ; but why did not the men who
could thus write come out boldly, and strongly, and loudly with
votes and speeches which, however they might have been denounced
by their party caucus, and by a class of party politicians at home,
would have saved the Union and their country ?

UNION» DISUNION, AND UEUNION. 27

ever may be the result of the present war, whether
one single constitution be destined again to apply to
the whole Union, or only to what shall remain after
Secession. It is simply, to make all offices, except
those of the cabinet, and perhaps a very few others of
the highest category, subject to removal only /or cause,
that is to say, misconduct or unfitness. The old
Whig party ought to favour this reform. They used
to charge the Democratic party with the chief respon-
sibility of the practice (that is a point of history not
w^orth examining now), and to reproach Governor
Marcy as the author of the party phrase, that '' to the
victors belong the spoils." This is our recognised
rule of political war when one party succeeds the
other in the possession of power ; the distribution of
the general plunder of Patronage when the same
party succeeds itself, by the election of a President of
the same politics as his predecessor, being then called
** rotation in office." These are twin phrases, of fair
plausibility, which have been invented to cloak the
same bad ugly thing, and for either of which we shall
search in vain in the Constitution. Probably the
framers of the Constitution never contemplated the
practice, which, stimulated by the vehemence of party
politics, a vehemence which other causes have also
assisted to promote, has grown gradually out of the
possession of power. No such practice having existed
in their day, its future development and efiPects could
not have been anticipated. It was a sunken rock,
unknown to charts of that period. To that rock.

28 UNION^ DISUNION, AND REUNION.

more than to any of the other wftpdratiiig canscs, is
the present wreck to be attributed. The leading idea
of the framers was simply to intensify the President's
individual responsibility for the execution of the laws.
That responsibility I do not propose to weaken. He
must stiU remain responsible for good appointments,
and he will make them all the better when relieved
from the pressure of those controlling party ** claims/'
which are now enforced, chiefly, though not solely,
through the members of Congress, as the represen-
tative party politicians of the locality. The power of
removal for cause will still hold him to the responsi-
bility of the misconduct or unfitness of incumbents.
All that is proposed is that he shall be required to
state the cause, which must necessarily be other than
mere difference of political opinions ; a ground which
is in itself no sufficient reason for depriving thousands
of families of their daily bread, and the public ser-
vice of the skilled experience of good officers. In
truth there is no real reason why the practice in
question should exist in regard to civil functionaries
any more than in regard to military and naval, or to
public employes, any more than to those of our
thousand of private, commercial, and industrial esta-
blishments ; — for why should not military and naval
officers be replaced out of the militia and merchant
marine services, on party grounds, as well as the civil
officers of the Government out of the general mass
of politicians? Whichever of the two parties may
have begun, both have equally adopted it. The

UNION, DISUNION, AND EEUNION. 29

practice is in itself vicious and pernicious, and the
sooner and the more completely the power is taken
away the better. A great step of improvement will then
have been taken towards perfecting the Constitution,
purifying our parties, and raising the tone of our
politics. Had this step alone been earlier taken.
Secession would never have occurred in our day.

X.

Directly connected with the evil of Patronage,
though 1 do not claim for it an equal magnitude of
mischief, is the excessive splendour of that grand
first-prize in the lottery scheme of our politics, the
Presidency, an object and temptation of ambition to
our great men, as the infinity of minor offices are to
our hundreds of thousands of lesser ones. The
salary here goes for nothing, but it is the magnifi-
cence of the power and of the greatness that con-
stitutes the evil.

Some prejudices may be shocked a little by the
phrase, but the truth is that our Presidency is nothing
more nor less than a quadrennial elective monarchy
minus the empty bauble of a crown. If he is not
called " your majesty," he, on the other hand, cumu-
lates in his office that still higher power, under con-
stitutional monarchies, of non-removable prime-mintater;
while he dispenses a far greater amount of official
patronage than any minister or monarch has the
opportunity of dispensing within the period of a long

30 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

reign. In a semi-palatial " White House/* he holds
a court, diflTering from some in Europe only in the
comparative absence of gilded expense, and that royal
etiquette from whose tedious trammels most kings
often delight for a while to escape. This great office
is too glittering a temptation, operating upon a
large class of men already in the position of influ-
ential chiefs and leaders. It tends too much to cor-
rupt honourable and patriotic ambition into intrigue
and demagogism. All disclaim, while all naturally
and necessarily, and many passionately, caress, in
secret, the fatal fascination. Leadership of a great
State or section — assiduous effort towards the widest
extension of connexion and influence — indirect court-
ing of the favour of other sections, to be superadded
to established party power at home — identification
with new or exaggerated ideas supposed to contain
the germs of future popularity* — negotiations con-
ducted by confidential representative friends at the
nominating conventions — what intelligent American
will not at once recognise these familiar features in
the political life and character of most of our great
men, though each may perhaps admit their existence
only in the prominent aspirants of the other side P
This is a very great evil, and eventually a very great

* Ex.gr, Mr. Buchanan's Ostend manifesto—Mr. Cass's summary
and immediate annexation — Mr. Polk's Mexican war~Mr. Seward's
anti-slavery — Mr. Clay's ''American System," consisting of high
Protection for the North, "sugar-coated" with internal improve-
ments for the West, and calculated to reinforce with an irresistible
combination of strength an already popular Southern man, &c. &c.

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 31

danger, though perhaps less palpable than the former
one of Patronage acting on the masses of our politi-
cians. A nation has no greater moral interest — and
the moral interests of nations blend inseparably with
the material — than in the purity and elevation of tone
of its great men, themselves the natural and actual
leaders and exemplars to its millions.

Another bad feature of this great, too great office,
a feature which at moments of crisis may become a
serious danger, is its four-years* inflexibility — may
become ? has been 1 Who can doubt but that the
revolution, which we call Secession, would have been
prevented by timely compromise during the critical
winter of 1860-1, had it not been for this very four-
years'-long inflexibility of the ministry just elected
to power, that is to say, the incoming President?
Who can deny a certain considerable reaction of minds
at the North, proved by several important local elec-
tions in New England itself, when the consequences
of the great popular mistake, just committed by the
North, began to be realized — when the long-cried
wolf of the Southern revolution was now heard howl-
ing in earnest at the door of the Union ? An ordinaiy
and removable ministry in power would have felt,
would have been made to feel, the pressure of that
public opinion. The fact that that pressure could
make itself effective would have developed it in modes,
and to a degree not to be expected where it was all
useless. But with us the President-prime-minister was
a ''fixed fact" for four years. The sole question was.

32 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

What would he do — he and his chief party councillors
— or rather he without and above them all P He and
they were chained immovably to a " platform " and a
party, while the party organization was committed to
sustaining whatever should prove to be his decision and
his action. The Union broke because, at a moment of
supreme crisis, the system had no power to bend.

Under our four-years' system, a President may hold
and wield the Government for all that period even
without a party at all, excepting such as he can create
out of his patronage. Our Government is, then, in
the situation of a watch with its mainspring out of
order. Such was that of Tyler, nominated as an
** available " adjunct to an ** available " Presidential
candidate, by a party which was then not less justly
punished, than immensely disgusted, when the death
of the latter,, within a month after his inauguration,
established in the Presidency a Government antago-
nistic to all its leading ideas, and soon the object of
its bitterest denunciations ; through all of which, how-
ever, he remained a " fixed fact '* in power (having
indeed given rise to that now cant Americanism), and
did his best, though in vain, through his four years,
to create a hybrid party for his own re-nomination.

Four years is a long term for a great minority to
sit down in contented resignation under this '^ fixed
fact" of an inflexible Government, of a set of men
and of principles both obnoxious to them. It is still
worse when, as in the recent case, that elected power
has against it the moral force of a really adverse

ONION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 33

popular majority ; and it ia a positive fact that "by
adding the unanimous Southern vote to the divisions
of the anti-Lincohi party at the North, there was a
popular majority, counted nationally, of about a
million against him. If the country had had before
it the prospect of being able to reverse a mistaken
vote in another year, there would have been no
Secession. The Confederate amended Constitution
is wrong, worse than the old one, on this point. It
has increased the Presidential term to six years. It
would have been far better to reduce it to one ;
though still it is certain that a sexennial Presidency
without Patronage will work much better than a
quadrennial with it.*

XI.

And why should the Presidential Election not be
annual? I beg the reader to accept this suggestion

* Another modificatioD made in the Confederate Constitution,
though of minor importance, yet good and practical, may be men-
tioned in passing, — ^that of requiring cabinet ministers to attend on
the floors of Congress to answer interrogations and explain and
^ justify their acts. This is well worthy of adoption by the North
also. But the " right of secession " recognised by implication in that
instrument creates too sandy a foimdation for the great political
structiure designed to be erected by it. The present cohesion of
homogeneity and of comparative weakness, oombined with the con-
servative influence of moderate governmental action at the Federal
ceutre under a ''State-Bights" theory of confederation, with small
executive patronage, would no doubt hold it together for a certain
time ; but the day must come, to the grandsons of the present gene-
ration, when the rain will fall and the winds will beat upon the
house, and the want of a firmer foundation will then make itself
fatally felt.

34 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

without any prejudices founded on our past practice,
and on the authority of the framers of the Consti-
tution, who, educated under an hereditary monarchy,
and pressed by a considerable party in favour of
an executive for life, made, certainly, a great step in
republican progress, when they adopted an elective
Presidency of four years; for the incumbency of
which there existed at that day so grand an order of
men, beginning with the natural first President
Washington. I have no idea that, could they have
foreseen the fierce party strifes and bitter animosities
which that quadrennial Presidency was to give birth
to, such would have been their solution of the difficult
problem how to constitute a well-balanced Federal
executive. The Roman system worked well for
centuries under annual presidents, called consuls;
there being, indeed, two of them at a time, so as
to permit the absence of one in command of the
frontier armies. The Swiss confederacy is represented
to foreign nations by a President with an annual
term, that office being successively occupied by the
members of a council (seven, I believe, in number),
who represent the diflTerent sections of the confe-
deracy ; a wonderfully wise arrangement. I need not
enumerate other republics whose executive chief ma-
gistrates have been annual. For many centuries the
successful little republic of San Marino has been
governed by chief magistrates succeeding each
other every six months. Most of the governors of
our States are biennial ; some annual. What is, after

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 85

all, the need, what the benefit, of a long-termed
executive ?

What do we want of Presidential ** policies^'* with
** time for their development*' ? We want the country
to be governed (that is to say, in regard to its federal
concerns), not by any man, but by the general mind,
working it^ "policy" and its will, through the ap-
pointed macliinery of legislation, with constant, popu-
lar intervention. We have no men so pre-eminently
superior but that, thank God, Sparta has many
hundreds of sons as good as he. We want a Pre-
sident simply as the executive of the laws at home,
and as the embodiment of the nationality abroad.
The real dignity of the office resides in the function
and the representation. As a third check upon in-
considerate legislation — that is to say, a third elective
representation of the collective national mind for that
purpose — the office has also another utility; nor should
it be divested of its present suspensive veto power.
But for all the legitimate purposes of an executive,
an annual one is all that is either needed or useful.
The office would never die, the function never inter-
mit, however individuals might succeed each other in
its administration. The helmsman on shipboard is
changed every two hours, but the wheel never sus-
pends its action. The governing power would be,
what I repeat it ought to be, the patriotic mind of
the country, enlightened by universal public discussion
in all its modes, and acting through the national
representation, with its threefold mutual checks upon

c2

86 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

precipitancy or error. No sudden and violent changes
of party and of policy could then occur to disturb
the much steadier march of public affairs, and dislo-
cate the system of the State. No motive springing
from angry and impatient discontent could then
dispose the thoughts of defeated minorities towards
revolution, when an obnoxious election would have
given power, and power reduced by the suppression
of Patronage, for but a single year. No temptation
to demagogical intrigue and management for the
attainment of a prize shorn of its useless and evil
splendours of attraction, would exert its perverting
influence upon the great political leaders, to all of
whom in fair turn it would fall, sooner or later, in the
natural and tranquil course of things. Its incumbent
would no longer be the special President of a party,
an object of sour and resentful ill-will to a great
minority — often, during the latter half of his term,
a great majority. While, as a political dignity and
power for all the purposes of foreign relations and
intercourse, a moral force dependent wholly on his
representative character, the annual President would
embody the fulness of the national greatness and
majesty, as did the Consul, and as does the Swiss
President, unadulterated by any mixture of weakness
grovnng out of his known loss of the popular sym-
pathy and support.

To the objection that such a frequency of Presi-
dential elections would keep us in perpetual hot
water, without even the slight intervals of repose

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 37

now allowed, I answer, that, on the contrary, it
would be the efiPectual remedy of that evil. It is
now that we are in that perpetual hot water. It is
the very magnitude, importance, and length of term
of the office, the splendid greatness of the prize, in
connexion with the vastness of the scheme of the
great national lottery always drawing or preparing to
draw, which makes and keeps the water hot. Remove
by reform these causes of the evil, and the evil itself
would disappear. Our Presidential elections are now
a quick succession of hurricanes sweeping over the
waves of the public mind, which is left by them, even
through the intervals, heaving and tossing in per-
petual unrest. I propose to convert that stormy
agitation into the gentle ripples of steady and salu-
brious breezes.

Alasl have not those hurricanes alrec^dy wrecked
the good ship of the State? With the blessing of
God, and good sense and good will among men, she
may yet right again, to bear henceforth her beloved
old flag for a long career of glorious prosperity over
smoother seas.

Let not this suggestion be met with the charge of
visionary innovation. The general experience of his-
tory is in favour of annual terras for elective executives.
It is our quadrennial one which was an innovation,
and which has now lasted its tens, while the others
lasted their hundreds of years ; and it is on a Presi-
dential election, and struggle of Presidential parties,
that we have now so soon broken down. It is the

38 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

long term ^hich awakens the great ambitions, and
stirs up the great struggles and passions of parties.
And the greater the scale of the national dimensions,
the greater the evil and the peril. This argument,
though novel at this day among us, is sound and
true, and I beg that it may be candidly received and
pondered.

XII.

We come now to the third flaw in our system, and
it is a very serious one — the indistinctness of the line
of demarcation of the limits of power between the
Federal and the State Governments.

Indeed, there is no such line, and it has become
now indispensable that one should be drawn. This
necessity is proved by the very fact that two ever-
conflicting schools of doctrine, and consequent parties,
have existed in the Union from its origin. They ex-
isted in the public mind of that day; in the convention
of the framers ; in the text of the Constitution, which
is but the expression of their difficult and long doubt-
ful compromise; and they have existed ever since.
The Constitution was the ark of the covenant, but,
unfortunately, no man could eter exactly say what
the Constitution was. With all its specifications and
limitations, even after the first amendments, there
remained the '' general welfare'' clauf^e, and the clause
authorizing '* all laws necessary and proper for carry-
inq into execution " the conceded powers — elastic

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 89

gcDeralities of phrase which served to bridge the
chasm of opinion between the " Consolidation '* and
the " State Rights " parties in the Convention and
among the statesmen of the time. Interpretation^ by
strict or by latitudinarian construction, had to come
into play, with the aid of the Federalist, the Madison
Papers, the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of
Madison and Jefferson, the debates of State ratifying
conventions, and other facts and documents of the
contemporaneous history, together with subsequent
judicial decisions, and consolidated usage. And that
interpretation^ twofold from the outset, which we may
call Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, or indeed Northern
and Southern, made of it, not one distinctly and
universally recognised Constitution, but two^ widely
different, and indeed conflicting. We have thus had
the maximum Constitution of federalism, and the mini'
mum one of ultra State rights, not to speak of the
variable medium one of a third large class. The
influence of this cause of disturbance and discord has
run through the whole course of our politics, colouring
the characters of parties, and determining or affecting
their various views of most of the practical measures
which have entered into the national policy of the
country.

Whichever of these two theories of the Constitu-
tion, twin from birth, be now, with the light of
seventy years' experience, selected as best in itself
and best adapted to our circumstances and character
— whether that of consolidated nationality, with a

40 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

strong governmental working from the centre, or that
of extreme limitation of the federal power and action ;
— either would be better, if distinctly and universally
i*ecognised, than the existing uncertainty and conflict
between the two. All men would then at least under-
stand, and understand alike, their duties and their
rights, and the just powenof the Government; and
parties and sections would no longer be led off on
widely divergent paths of opinion into positions of
antagonism tending to become irreconcilable, each
under the belief that it was in the true line of the
Constitution, and that the other was false, usurpatory,
and in violation of its true meaning and effect.

I do not pretend to pronounce for other minds
which of the two systems would be best in itself.
That is a fair subject for candid discussion ; a discus-
sion not to be evaded, if we would now really reunite
the Union. The South has gone off on the minimum
theory, and is fighting in revolutionary civil war to
make it good, in its extremest consequences, against
the Northern interpretation of the Constitution. In
the North, under the natural influences of the situa-
tion, even the democratic party, openly on the part of
many, in tacit submission on the part of others, seems
now to have united for a time with the Whig party,
on that maximum theory which was, indeed, always
frankly avowed and practised by the latter. The
general Northern idea seems to be, that a stronger
central government is now needed than we have had
heretofore. It is a common phrase, that we have had

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 41

no government, and must henceforth have one. This
is a natural tendency of roinds at this moment, but I
hope to succeed in satisfying some few at least, that
the very reverse is the true moral of all this great and
sad history. If I had not long ago been convinced
that the only possible hopejof long keeping together
our already enormous an^ still growmg confederation
lay in reducing and moderating as much as possible
the central power and action, that is to say, in cur-
tailing as much as possible the scope of its influence
upon the internal concerns of the States, whether
exerted directly or indirectly, secession and the civil
war would have converted me to that vital truth of
our political salvation. To that doctrine, indeed,
sooner or later, we must all come, whether for appli-
cation to the old Union reunited, or only to that still
vast residuary confederacy which would be left even
after the loss of the South, embracing the East, the
Atlantic Centre, the Lake Region, the great valleys of
the Ohio, Upper Mississippi and Missouri, and, finally,
the Pacific section, whose growth in population will
soon fulfil all the conditions on which rests the argu-
ment now applied to the old Union as a supposed
whole.

To that argument, I now ask the patriotic consi-
deration particularly of the old Federalist school of
our politicians. Let none, at such a time, be influenced
by nan'ow and selfish considerations of consistency or,
habit, nor by the resentful passions of civil strife, from
opening their minds to a candid reception of ideas

42

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

perhaps heretofore honestly opposed by them. The
issue at stake is the present restoration of the Union
and of peace, and the future peaceful permanence of
whatever at the close of this war may prove to be the
Union. Our circumstances are now vastly changed
from all that they were when the Consolidation theory
may have been a necessary or a good one. A flood of
new light, too, is now shed upon the whole subject,
by the dread experience we are now passing through.
I need not add, that true wisdom is to be found in
candidly changing with altered circumstances and
new evidences.

For convenience, I consign to a note some statistical
figures, which cannot be too thoughtfully and anxiously
pondered.*

* The following table was prepared previously to the Census of
1860. I have not at hand the official figures of that ^Census, in
regard to which it is enough to say that they carry out the laws of
population established by the series of the preceding censuses. The
aggregate population was about 31,450,000; the slaves about
4,000,000.

Natural in-

1 g

Teal's.

Population.

Increase.

Immigration.

crease, exclu-
sive of

ill

1 ?"^

! immigration.

1

Pi

OG

1790

3,929,827

i

!

1800

5,305,925

1,375,098

351

60,000 1,325,098 337 \

1810

7,239,814

1,933,889 364

70,000 1,863,889 | 351 |

1820

9,638,131

2,398,317 j 353

114,000 2,284,314

315 I

1830

12,866,020

3,227,889 \ .334

135,986 ; 3,091,903

320

1840

17,069,453

4,203,433 ! 326

579,370 3,624,063 j

281 1

1

1850

23,191,876 6,122,423 ; 358

1,677,330

4,445,093

260 !

The

TJNIdN, DISUNION, AND REUNION,

43

XIII.

All history proves the difficulty of long holding
together under one government any enormous masses
of population, spread over vast and varied expanses of
territory. History is, indeed, the necrology of " dead

The principal object aimed at was to establish the natural rate of
grototh hjf excess of births over deaths independently of the increase by
immigration, with a view to calculation for the ^ture. Discarding
the first three figures in the last column, because no accurate records
of the earlier immigration were kept, the Censuses of 1830, 1840,
and 1850 yield us the figures 320, 281, and 260 as that natural rate of
growth, I therefore assume 250 per 1,000 as a fair and safe basis
of calculation for the total decennial increase of the population for
the next 100 years. The moderation of this must be admitted when
it is considered that the following elements of increase are included
in it, over and above the natural increase — namely, Ist. Immigra-
tion and the multiplying progeny of immigrants ; 2d. Population of
countries which may hereafter enter by accession or annexation
into the Union ; and 3d. Improved sanitary science, tending to
increase the proportion of children surviving to puberty, and to
prolong life and, consequently, the number of births. It is evident
that the 250 per 1,000 for the total increase (adopted for moderation
and convenient roundness of figures) must be considerably below
the mark.

The following table, then, carries forward the estimate at that rate
from the starting point which was assumed in advance as the popu-
lation of 1860. It was, in fact, about half a million more, but in
view of the effects of the present war, it may fairly be lefb, for the
present purposes of calculation, at thirty-one millions.

1860 . .

. . 31,000,000

1920. .

. . . 118,255,613

1870 . .

. . 38,750,000

1930 .

. . . 147,819,516

1880 . .

. . 48,437,500

1940. .

. . 184,785,395

1890 . .

. . 60,546,875

1950 . .

. . . 230,981,991

1900 . .

. . 75,683,593

1960 .

. . . 288,726,488

1910 . .

. . 94,604,491

Mr. Lincoli

3, in his annual Messfl

tcre, calls ati

Bntion to this stupe

dous prospect of population, assuming 250 millions within a cen-

44 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION,

empires/* It was on this point, that Sir E. Bulwer
Ijytton rested his recent argument for the impossi-
bility of any long cohesion of our Union, believing
that the day of necessary disintegration had already
come. Such masses may, indeed, be held together
for a certain time, through an intensely centralised
power, despotically administered, and acting on the
more remote provinces with the local ascendancy of
vigilant military energy directed from the imperial
centre. Such was the Roman system. Yet even
these soon crumble from their own magnitude and
weight, and the dislocating influence of so much force
radiating from a centre to a distant circumference.

tury. President Pierce had done substantiallj the same thing in his
Message of 1853. If the political moral drawn by President Pierce
from this census law of our population had been bettor heeded by
All*. Lincoln's party, we should have had no secession. If Mr. Lincoln
will but ponder over the philosophy of his own statistics, he must,
I think, concur in the leading idea which it is the object of this
pamphlet to elucidate— namely, the absolute necessity of now modify-
ing our confederate system, by moderating our great national par-
ties, purifying our politics, and reducing the action of the central
force, in order to adapt it to its enlarged scale of application, and
to have any chauce of long maintaining the cohesion of such enor-
mous masses of population.

If any reader should doubt the possibility of this incontrovertible
arithmetic, let him remember— 1st. That the population of China,
within territory much less than our existing space, is estimated by
Sir John Bowring, the intelligent British Commissioner to that
country, at about 450 millions ; and 2d. That no earthly power can
prevent the necessary overspilling of this vast growth of our ex-
pansive race over all Mexico and Central America. This growth of
population is quite independent of the question whether we shall
exist as one, two, or several confederacies. On the true principles of
large confederation there is no reason why we should not exist as one^
in a system which would then simply represent Peace, Free Trade,

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

45

The very provincial armies needed for the maintenance

ley come, m spite of aiscipj
to share in the surrounding disaffection — and all is
over. If of different origin, their commanders, like
Julius Caesar, make great military revolts; or, like
the subsequent Praetorian armies, they elevate their
generals to independent power, whether for the
separation of distant provinces, or, with struggles of
civil war, for the possession of the imperial capital.
The Roman system of nationality on a large scale is
clearly inapplicable now, and for America. How
the Saracen empire, how the Macedonian, how the

no great tianding armiety and no expensive royaltiesy spread over a vast
ooDtinent.

Is not such a prospect worth a plank in a Party "Platform" ?

The following tahle exhibits the past growth of our slave popula-
tion ; which since the year 1810 has been all founded on the natural
growthy with some diminution for escapes and voluntary emancipa-
tion. It shows that the ratio of natural growth of the slaves is
about equal to that of the whites. The falling off in the decade of
years 1830-40, is attributable to the ravages of the cholera within
that period, which were particularly severe among the blacks.

Yean.

Nomben.

Increase.

Increase
per 1,000.

1790

697,897

1800

893,041

196,164

279

1810

1,191,364

298,323

334

1820

1,638,038

346,674

291

1830

2,009,043

471,006

306

1840

2,487,466

478,412

238

1860

3,204,313

716,868

288

1860

4,000,000

796,000

261

46 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

Persian, how the Assyrian, how — to return to a more
modem age — that of Charlemagne, the Germanic, and
the Spanish, thus crumbled in disintegration, I need
not pause to describe.

One great instance certainly exists of long-continued
cohesion of vast masses of population, though not,
indeed, spread over territories nearly so vast or so
varied as ours — the Chinese. But this, too, is an
intense and sanguinary military despotism, fortified
with the theocratic influence, and exercised by a race
of superior energy, the Tartars, over an unarmed and
nerveless population of feeble rice-eaters, who, mul-
tiplying like rabbits, seem to have the souls of rabbits.
Yet even China is known to be in a chronic state of
virtual division, through revolutionary struggles of
rebel hosts, always exercising a savage and bloodthirsty
domination in some large province or other of the
empire. Our population does not live on rice ; every
man has a rifle, and arm and neiTe to use it ; and
submissiveness to force is not one of the elements of
our proud, independent, and energetic national charac-
ter ; in a word, we are not Chinese.

Again, in Russia we see about sixty millions held
together ; but Russia, as a great empire, is still in the
youth of her age of conquest by superior arms and
discipline over inferior barbaric tribes, which go largely
to s\¥ell that, mass of population ; while military de-
spotism, combined with the theocratic power in great
vigour, is the indispensable condition of the cohesion
even of the ftussian empire. That system also is clearly

UNION, DIBUNION, AND REUNION. 47

inapplicable to us and to America — ^to say nothing of
the fact that our millions are soon to count not by
tens but by hundreds. Ominous crackings, too, are
beginning to be heard out of the heart of the huge
iceberg of the Russian imperial system. Demands for
local self-government already dare to arise mutteringly
from the prostrate, all but adoring, masses of the pro-
vincial population. How long it will hold together
after habits of political life and action shall have
formed themselves in the great provinces or sections,
and after the people shall have risen to some general
uniformity of civilization, remains yet to be seen.
Clearly the case of Russia affords no grounds to our
Consolidation school for any argument for the possi-
bility of national cohesion among us to be long
maintained by central force.

XIV.

And of all forms of government, when sought to
be applied on a very large scale, confederation is that
in which cohesion is the most difficult to be main-
tained by the central, federal, or national force — call
it what you will ; and we are a confederacy, and never
can be anything else. Confederation implies separa-
tion ever ready at a touch. However the right of
secession as a corollary to accession may be denied in
the forum and fought in the field, yet the fact is
beyond controversy that confederation involves revolu-
tion (in the event of provocation) practically ready in

48 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

advance, and organized with governmental machinery,
ever prepared, on the first blow of offence or of
injury, to spring into full armed life, with such
stature, power, and political respectability, as to make
suppression, war.

In empires, too, the central authority, being in a
dynasty, has a certain hold on all the parts through
the traditionary sentiment of loyalty, supported by
the social power of a great and pervading aristocracy,
usually interposed between the monarch and the mass.
In such a confederacy as ours, the central power is
simply that of majority in intangible abstraction ; and
when it runs into the fonn of a sectional one, coinci-
dent with diversity of interest and of character, then
its dominion comes to be regarded simply as an alien
yoke, against which the hearts of the overborne
minority section rebel in moral war, long before their
hands snatch the ready arms of revolution — an aUen
yoke all the more hated by reason of that jealousy
always prone to arise between neighbouring com-
munities.

So long as the states of a confederacy are small
and weak, and especially when surrounded by great
neighbours, or when their independence has been
born out of a severe revolutionary struggle, they will
naturally huddle round the central power, by the
instinct of self-preservation, with an attachment that
may be called, as it is with us, national loyalty.
Such, it is scarcely worth while to remark, is, by
geographical necessity, the permanent condition of

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 49

the Swiss confederacy. During that age or stage of
their existence it is natural that the idea of centralized
and consolidated power should be as it has been among
us, a favourite one with a large class of honest and
patriotic minds.. When, with the growing magnitude
of its population and territory, the strong govern-
mental action of the centre begins to give symptoms
of shaking and dislocating the vast parts, through the
great conflicts and consequent passions of parties,
organized in huge masses and contending for immense
interests, combined with the discontents and reciprocal
jealousies of large sections, it is natural too that that
same class of minds should incline to the idea that the
Government is " not strong enough ;" that it needs to
be strengthened, at least by the most vigorous use
and the largest possible interpretation of its powers.
AlasJ perhaps the true evil was that it was already too
strong, or was worked too violently.

The father surrounded by his infant family can with
safety and advantage exercise a strong domination,
for the good of the whole and the maintenance of
the family cohesion — but let him beware of continuing
the same, or anything like the same system of domestic
government after he has come to be surrounded with
young grown men, spirited, strong, and self-sufficing.
If he desires to " preserve the union," there will be
no inconsistency, but only common sense, in an entire
change of system, now proper ^nd necessary, even
though perhaps not so before. They can now and
henceforth be held together only in a purely voluntary

60 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

cohesion ; that is to say, by making each feel that the
domestic authority can never press hardly nor offen-
sively upon him, and that he enjoys all the benefit of
innumerable happy advantages by the side of the
common hearth, with no possibility of improving his
condition, whether morally or materially, by quitting
it, so that no motive can ever prompt the wish or
thought of doing so.

XV.

How wisely has England of late applied to her
now well-grown colonies of Canada and Australia the
political idea shadowed out in this domestic illustration I
Before that reform which is an_ imperishable monu-
ment to its author, — ^the Earl of Durham,* — Canada,
though not yet numbering two millions, was profoundly
revolutionary. England, which had before governed,
had the sagacity to emancipate her; giving her a
system of complete self-government, through a local
parliament and a ministiy dependent only on the
parliamentary majority; with a nominal govemor
whose appointment by the Crown stands as the m&e
formal expression of the British nationality and co-
hesion. Knowing the mother-countiy thenoefiurth
only by its mifitaiy and naval protection, by particap^

* Befo(«tlleSariofDllrilaIl^Fozl»d8udmBulittlMDt»ml791,
with referenoe to Ouiada: ""IdonoilieBitatetoaaj, thatif alool
Hgahtttre be KbeimDy fagipedl, that qmnnwUn ca would modi
mo to oTwIook defects in the other wgnhtionw, b ec e nae I am
Tinoed that tJk omlf meiMpd 9fre{mimimg duimmi eolmda mM

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 51

tion in the dignity and pride of the common historic
flag, and by the sympathies and benefits of free com-
mercial intercourse, rebel Canada, in spite of the
neighbouring American example and sympathy, and
of the obvious facility of American annexation, has
become within twenty years one of the most loyal
members of what is called the British Empire. Instead
of strengthening, England all but annulled, her govern-
mental power and hold upon Canada, and interference
in Canadian affairs. She made the relation of her
great colony to herself a virtually federal and voluntary
one— even to the extent of de facto recognising the
" right of secession ; *' not indeed in legal form, but
by signifying aloud, through all the organs of public
opinion, that if ever Canada shall come to desire
separation from the British Crown she will never be
^^ coerced'^ into submission. England has thus in
truth drawn far closer than ever before the bond of
lational cohesion.

The only partial element of disloy^ynow left in
Canada is indeed that Irish element wiS^ immigra-
tion carries across the Atlantic, to Canada as to us,
a deep-seated hatred of England, generated by the
very opposite system unwisely applied by England to
Ireland at home. Yet even among the Irish in Canada
we have recently seen the phenomenon of some of
the leading Irish " rebels " — rebels of late in Ireland
— converted into the most loyal and zealous supporters
of the British cohesion and nationality in Canada;
even to the length of raising volunteer regiments to

d2

62 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

resist an apprehended annexing invasion from us, of
which invasion American-Irish troops would have led
the van.

How pregnant with instruction, in regard to the
true policy and true principles of Confederate union,
is all this to us, at this eventful moment of our own
political life !

XVI.

Our successive censuses have long foreshadowed
the approach of the period when the problem of the
durability of the Union was to be submitted to its
real test. Could it hold together at 300 millions?
Could it at 250 ? At 200? At 100? At 50?— and
the highest of these figures is possibly to be reached
within the lifetime of some thousands of children
already bom, while those children will not be out of
their teens before the attainment of the fifty millions.
Alas ! at little more than thirty millions we are already
fighting, on the most gigantic scale of civil war ever
yet witnessed, to hold back in it a great minority
section, which had become so alienated in heart from
the Union as to defy any sacrifices and any perils
rather than return into it !

This danger of dislocation, so fatally incident to all
large confederations, can never, in our case, come from
individual States. They., are too small for separate
nationality ; too weak to stand alone ; independence
being costly and hazardous as Well as noble. It is

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 58

when a great section becomes disaffected, a section
large, populous, and wealthy enough to make a nation,
that the danger begins. This is the case of the child
grown into manhood.

There must always be a certain tendency, with the
mere fact of great and growing size, towards the
thought of separation. Independent self-government
is a passion in the Anglo-Celtico-Saxon breast. It
was that proud instinct, much more than a' little un-
represented taxation, that prompted our own revolu-
tion. Local attachment, sectional pride and jealousy,
impatience of old things and aspiration towards new,
dislike of external interfering control — these dis-
integrating elements must always, to a certain degree,
exist. The true policy of constitution, for a large
confederacy, is to afford these elements the least pos-
sible material to feed upon ; and no means of acting
on the general public sentiment and opinion of the
masses of the population, so as to disaffect them, and
prepare them to follow the lead of those who should
ever urge them in the direction of separation. This
is to be secured only by keeping the general public
mind of the section, of all the sections, thoroughly
imbued with the knowledge that they could not
possibly better their position, strengthen their social
security, develop their interests, or ennoble their
national life, by any change, least of all by separation.
No policy therefore should be pursued — and for that
purpose no powers should be .allowed to the Federal
centre capable of being applied by the majority to the

54 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

prosecution of any policy— calculated or tending to
irritate or alienate any of the great sections ; to inter-
fere with its peculiar domestic concerns ; to endanger
its security, or to agitate it with the belief or fear of
coming danger ; to offend its popular sentiment by
an}rthing insulting^ or regarded by it as insulting (for
men will fight to the death on a little insult who will
tolerate great injuries); nor to cause it to regard
itself as aggrieved by inequality in the public burthens.
The day is not distant when our Pacific section will
attain the stature sufficient for nationality. Does any
one imagine that it could be kept in the confederacy
by "coercion," after its general public mind should
have once become seriously disaffected and irritated,
through a course of policy pursued or threatened by
the other sections established by majority in possession
of the Government at Washington ? Apply the same
reasoning to the Mississippi Valley. Or to the great
commercial and manufacturing section of the Atlantic
seaboard. Whatever be the result of the present
great national effort to coerce the South back into the
Union, whether it succeed or fail, no similar attempt
mil ever again he undertaken against any great section
bent on separation. Small as is the South now in
population, and hampered as its white population has
been supposed to be by the presence of its four
millions of black' slaves, the enormous sacrifices of
both blood and prosperity the war has already cost,
is costing, and the gigantic public debt it will
have left behind, will prevent the Federal Govern-

UNION, BISXTNION, AND RSUNION. 56

ment ever again entering upon a second war of
'' coercion.'* I even doubt extremely whether this
one would ever have been undertaken, even by those
whose influence prevailed to establish the coercive
policy in the long hesitating mind of Mr. Lincoln, had
the proportions and character into which it was to
swell bc^n really anticipated. But Secession, though
resolved upon in the influential councils of a whole
section, began, in form and in execution, from a single
small State; seemed to hesitate in Georgia; paused
in North Carolina ; and stopped for a time within the
still comparatively weak limits of the Gulf States.
The Government and incoming governing party got
thus gradually but inextricably committed to the view
that it was but a small and weak rebellion, to be soon
and easily crushed out. Itself led on by the apparent
prospect of quick and easy triumph, party triumph as
well as governmental, it was able, very adroitly and
very successfully, to lead along with it the whole
North, in the sacred names of Patriotism and the
Union, to follow the Flag to which none could refuse
to rally, when displayed from the capitol in danger.
Whatever be the immediate issue, one ulterior result
must follow, namely, a determination that the Union
shall never be allowed to get into such a scrape again ;
and, with a view to that object, a general reaction in
the public mind against what may be called the
Federal-force theory of our Government. Many may
not perhaps at the present moment realize it, but all
minds will soon come to understand that population

56 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

has now brought us to the beginning of a new epoch ;
that the great sections have now grown to manhood ;
that there must be no more irritating, no more insult-
ing, no more defying any of them ; no more disaffect-
iug any of them by unfairly distributed taxation ; no
more undertaking to dominate any one of them by
consolidation of the rest in sectional majority against
it ; no more great wars of coercion — ^in a word, no
more of precisely all that which (less through the fault
of men than of that of a system defective in certain
points, however good and great in others) has brought
us to the present pass.

And this is but another form of saying, that, now
that we have grown to our present dimensions, and
that our decennial growth is to be counted henceforth
in tens of millions, our system must undergo such
reform as shall perfect it on the true principles of
confederation on a large scale. It is not enough to
reform administration ; there must be amendment of
those features which have been found to lead oi* con-
tribute to mal-administration. There must be, first,
correction of all indistinctness in the demarcation of
the Federal powers ; and second, the utmost limitation
of those powers compatible with their object, so as to
secure the minimum of irritating interference with the
internal concerns of any of the component sections.

I will concede, if you please, that heretofore the
Federalist theory may have been a good one for the
infancy of our confederation — though I am far from
so thinking. I ask only the admission that henceforth

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 57

it is uo longer applicable to our present and future
stupendous development of population and territory.
Surrendering the unsatisfactory Fast, I plead only for
the great Future. Without disputing what the Con-
stitution may have been or may now be — whether the
maximum theory of it, the minimum, or some vague
and variable medium between the two, be its tnie in-
terpretation — I speak only of what it must at any
rate be now unequivocally made, for adaptation hence-
forth to its vastly enlarged scale of application.

XVII.

A perfect republican confederation on a large scale
involves the following ideas : —

1. United nationality for foreign relations, high-
seas jurisdiction, and the public defence, involving the
power of concluding treaties, making peace and wai;,
and maintaining a standing army and navy.

2. Internal freedom of trade and communication,
involving a uniform mutual guarantee of civil rights
to all the States, non-harbouring of fugitives from
each other's laws, a common postal system, uniformity
in laws of bankruptcy, and immunity of ' internal
traffic and travel from river and harbour tolls, beyond
what may be necessary for the cost of improvements
therein.

3. Uniformity in duties on imports and exports,
and in regulation of foreign commerce, and a common
lighthouse system.

68 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

4. Unifonnity in the measures of value, weight and
dimensions, and of patent and copyrights.

5. Organization of the legislative machinery of the
Federal Government with the threefold checks, of,
Ist, equal representation of the States in one branch ;
2d, pro rata popular representation in another, and
3d, suspensive veto (unless overridden by two-thirds
votes of the legislative chambers) in the executive
representing the collective Federal nationality.

6. Organization of the executive with all the powers
necessary for efficient execution of the Federal laws,
but no more ; with the minimum of official patronage
compatible with responsibility for their execution;
and, as far as possible, so that the election to that
important and semi-regal office shall not create violent
party agitations throughout the confederacy, absorb-
ing and subordinating the locally more important
politics of State affairs.

7. A Federal judicial machinery for the execution of
the Federal laws, and for uniformity and impartiality
in the dispensation of justice between citizens of
different States.

8. Power of trustee administration of all common
property of the Confederation, whether territorial or
personal, on the trust principle assuring to all the
joint owners represented by the Federal authority
an equal respect of rights.

9. Local Federal jurisdiction over the seat of resi-
dence of the Federal Government, with a view to
guarantee the security and tranquillity of the Govern-

UNION, DISUNION, AND ftSUNlON. 59

ment, and the equal personal rights of all citizens of
the several States, coming there as visitors or resi-
dents; but this power, like the preceding one of
trustee administration of common property, not to be
open to the abuse of being so exeicised as to affront
or attack indirectly the institutions of the respective
States or sections.

10. Self-subsistence through a direct personal rela-
tion between the Federal Government and the indi-
vidual citizen ; through a sworn duty of all State
functionaries to support the Federal Constitution as
well as the constitutions of their respective States ;
and through the power to collect its own revenue,
such collection of its revenue being on principles of
uniformity and equity in regard to all the States,
without favouritism to any local interests at the
expense of other States or sections.

11. Obligation to exert the Federal force for the
maintenance of domestic peace and order when called
upon by the State authorities.

12. Power of admitting additional members into
the Confederation, but this power not to be used with
partiality in favour of or against any portion of the
confederacy, by proscribing the admission of new
States on account of domestic institutions authorized
by the laws of existing members, and as such entitled
to the Federal respect.

13. Power of refusing consent to the secession of
existing members from the confederacy, whose geo-
graphical relations to the rest may render their

60 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

continued association necessary to the general security
or well-being ; with power to coerce, in such case,
by simple coast blockade and non-intercourse by
land, and withholding of Federal benefits.

14. Guarantee to the citizen of all the great
personal rights usually embodied in Bills of Rights,
which it is needless to enumerate, and prohibition to
the Federal Government of any extension of its func-
tions or power beyond their clearly defined limits,
with special prohibition of the use of the conceded
powers for the indirect object of an irritating inter-
ference with the internal concerns of any of the States.

15. And finally, supremacy of the Federal Constitu-
tion and laws, within those distinctly defined limits,
over anything that should be at variance therewith
in the constitution or laws of any State ; but on the
other hand, nullity of any Federal law transcending
those limits, with some recognised tribunal of supreme
arbitrament to decide thereon in cases of dispute
between a State and the Federal Government.*

* The Supreme Court Is presumed to subserve this purpose now.
But it is humbly submitted some further check upon unconstitu-
tional legislation is requii*ed. The mere mXL of the Federal Qovem-
ment, interpreting its own powers, is clearly not sufficient, whether
AS a restraint or as a guarantee against jealous uneasiness on the
part of the States. The Supreme Court, in the practical working of
this function, does not appear quite enough for this high power and
duty of arbitrating between a State and the Federal Qovemment,
when the former shall have impeached the constitutionality of a law
passed by the latter. That court, a tribunal of lawyers, generally,
indeed, but not always very great ones, does not in fact command
sufficient political authority to determine such high controversy
between co-ordinate sovereignties at issue ux)on the vital question

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 61

Such a confederation as this (and it differs from
our old one but in a very few amendments, suggested
by our past and present experience), however full
might be the energy of the central authority within

of their reflpective powers. Its decisions have, in point of &ct, in
the coarse of time varied, being influenced by the prevalence of the
one or the other of the two schools of constitutional doctrine in
majority on its bench. The (Tountrj, or a State, has more than once
overruled its decisions, which, though conclusive as to individual
legal rights, are not recognised as having supreme political force.
South Carolina once resorted to the remedy of State " nullification **
of a Federal law impeached by her as unconstitutional ; and that
controversy was never really settled, having been in fact compromised
away by change of the law in question simultaneously with desist-
ance from the proceeding of nullification. Other analogous cases
might be cited, as that of Georgia, in regard to the Indian tribes
witbiu her limits. The constitutionality of a National Bank, asserted
by the Supreme Court, was overruled by the still higher effective
authority of the public opinion and public will, after much and
violent discussion. The Dred Scott decision has been of late wholly
disregarded, in it? moral and political authority, by a great party,
and, indeed, by the majority section of the Union — ^and a great public
misfortune this has been. The only political effect of a decision of
the Supreme Court on such occasions has been found to be that of
stimulating the great party whose constitutional views may have
been condemned by it to greater exertions to sustain them through
elections and consequent legislation, and to strive to change even-
tually the political complexion of the court as the aged lives of its
members fell in. I do not speak of what ought to be, but of what
has been and is. Now, the moral authority and dignity of that
great court ought not to be subjected to this damaging association
with politics. The greatest danger to union in a confederacy is
conflict between the Federal Qovemment and a State, or section of
contiguous States, upon these vital questions of constitutionality.
We need some better safety-valve against that danger than the
Supreme Court, though meant in part for that purpose, has, in fact,
proved to be. The knowledge of the existence of such adequate
safety-valve would impart a sense of security which would materially
counteract the tendency to revolution in a dissatisfied section.
Might not such additional safety-valve be found in a new provision

62 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

definite limits, might well hope to be indefinite in
duration and in capability of expansion. The vaster
and more populous its extent, the more various the
local interests of States and sections, all being best
developed by perfect freedom of internal trade and
intercourse, the greater the common benefit from all

by which, when any State should formally impeach the constitntion-
aUty of a Federal law, it should be the duty of the President to
convene a high court of special commissioners, one from each State,
to decide on such question of disputed constitutionality, no law
being held to be constitutional which should be condemned by over
one-third of that body ? Every State, for its own credit, would have
itself represented by its first men, its most eminent judicial states-
men, on such occasions, its ex-presidents, and men of similar category.
Such occasions would be very rare. The existence of that resort
would prevent nullifications and secessions, or resistances to laws
regarded by States as unconstitutional, better than any apprehensions
of coercive civil war. The conservative public opinion and moral
force of the whole country would sustain the action of such a high
court of constitutional commissioners, and dissatisfied opinions
would be overborne by an atmospheric pressure of the general mind.
Some such new sa/ety-valve, some such solemn and extraordinary
tribunal of arbitrament between the Federal G(ovemment and
dissatisfied States, would at least be very useful, though it is not
advanced as absolutely necessary. How could any State rebel against
a law impeached by it as unconstitutional, when it should have been
sustained as constitutional by two-thirds of such a tribunal ? On the
other hand, a new law thus impeached by a State, and condemned by
over one-third of such a tribunal, had better not go into efieoi In
Europe controversies between sovereignties, when not referred to
force, are arbitrated by some mutually friendly sovereignty. As
between the co-ordinate .sovereignties of our federative system, this
resource is not open to us. But what is here suggested would be the
intervention of the combined sovereignties of the Confederation,
convened in a special form, and with extraordinary solemnity for
that purpose. We cannot too carefully guard our federative sfystem
on this its weakest point in reference to the contended harmony
of its parts, on which the permanence of the Union is mainly
dependent.

DNION, DISUmOK, AND KSUNIOKl. 63

these uniform institutions, and from all this conti*
nental peace and tranquillity, the more manifest to all
the economy of having but a single national govern-
ment, and the stronger the inducement to each State
to ding, with equal attachment and conviction, to a
confederacy in which each would combine ail the
freedom of self-government with all the dignity and
security of a great power. Thus organized, we could
confront without fear of disintegration the huge
arithmetic of our swift-approaching hundreds of
millions ; while, necessarily pacific from our confede-
rate character, from our very diversity of interests,
and from the importance of peace to their reciprocal
development^ we should be no object of apprehension
to foreign powers, except frt)m that slow and silent
influence of our example, which would, indeed, even-
tually educate the future generations of Europe to the
imitation of such a model of continental peace and
universal prosperity.

This is the ideal of confederation on a large scale,
and the only possible basis on which confederation on
a very large scale can hope long to subsist. And this
was substantially the idea of the framers of our
system ; and only a few slight modifications of detail
are proved by our experience to be needed, to com-
plete and perfect their great work.

But if the system be such, or be so administered,
as to enable the Federal authority, which must be
wielded by the majority, to bear unequally, and there-
fore oppressively and offensively, upon a considerable

64 UNIOir, DISUNION, AND EKOHIOH.

minority, to attack its domestic institotions through
the indirect interference of the Federal power thoe-
with, to menace the permanent security oi its social
system, and at the same time to irritate the general
susceptibility of the public feeling in the minority
section, by the motives and mode of such interference,
alienation must be the inevitable result — aspiration to
independence — ^in a word, revolutionary secession.

XVIII.

And this brings us to the fourth of those dements
of evil assigned on a former page as the causes which
have brought us to the present situation, and which
must be reformed if we would get out of it now and
avert its recurrence hereafter, namely, the Northern
tendency to overwork and misapply the central
Federal power, in modes calculated to alienate and
exasperate the South, and fatal to permanent confe-
deration ; those modes having been chiefly through the
Protective policy, and hostile interference with the
great social question of Slavery at the South.

The South is exclusively agricultural; the East
almost exclusively manufacturing ; the Atlantic Mid-
dle States largely manufacturing, while Pennsylvania
is also a great coal and iron State. The operation of
the Protective system is manifestly to tax heavily the
agricultural South, in the form of prices, for the
peculiar benefit of the manufacturing and mineral
section. The Southern statesmen have been angrily

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 65

protesting against this system for a period of now
nearly forty years. Their estimate of the tribute thus
levied upon the South, for the profit of the North, has
been, at the least, fifty millions of dollars a yciar. Its
injurious effect upon the South they have felt to be
still further aggravated by the fact that the peculiar
products of Southern agriculture, cotton, rice, tobacco
and naval stores, have constituted the main basis of
the national exchange with Europe, so that all dimi-
nution of imports from Europe, by means of high
tariffs, has proportionately damaged the European
market for Southern products, international com-
merce being necessarily nothing but barter, facilitated
through bills of exchange. Tbey have protested,
denounced, and struggled in vain. Protection has
been one of the great party ideas. Even the agricul-
tural West has largely supported it, partly under the
influence of Clay and the Whig party, and partly
because a high Federal revenue, derived from the tariff,
tended in favour of the great Western interest of
internal improvements. If the Federal revenue had
really been raised in some fair mode, bearing uni-
formly upon all, and if then a further tax had been
imposed for the purpose of paying a system of boun-
ties for the encouragement of the Northern manu-
factures, coal and iron, the South would have paid
about fifty millions a year towards that object* The
indirect mode of levying this tribute is not a bit less
in violation of the spirit, not to say the letter of the
Constitution^ than would have been this direct and

E

66 UNION, DISUNION, AND RBUNION.

undisguised one. Probably it would have been less
oppressive in point of fact. The only wonder is that
the South has not risen in revolution against such a
system long ago. They gave a great revolutionary
start in 1831, but were half deterred, half coaxed
into quiet by a compromise conceding, substan-
tially, the principle claimed by them. The interlacing
influence of the great national parties, then not sec-
tional in their distribution, operated strongly, at that
time, in favour of cohesion. But the North did not
long adhere to the faith of the tariff compromise of
1831. The Protection influence, possessing the full
strength of the Whig party and a portion of that of
the Democratic party also at the North, was too strong
for it. The whole existing generation at the South
has thus grown up in deep and bitter disaffection
against the North on this ground ; and no wonder.
It was not enough, as a single cause, yet to produce
revolution, but it is a strong proof of the really pro-
found attachment of the South to the Union and to
the Constitution, that it did not produce it long
before. It ploughed and prepared the ground, how-
ever, deeply and long, for that bloody crop which the
sword is now reaping.

Meanwhile there was at work another influence
tending even more strongly towards the same result,
namely, the Anti-Slavery Agitation at the North. This
was from the outset founded on misconception of the
idea of confederationy which involves mutual respect
for each other's equality and rights, and non-responsi-

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 67

bilityfor each other's internal institutions, laws, or
opinions. As far back as the time of the Missouri
question, the North assumed the right of abhorring
the social system of half the States in the confederacy,
so far as to declare that that system should constitute
a disqualification for the entrance of any new member
into the Union. This was already in itself a gross
violation of the spirit of the Constitution. If that
position had been adhered to, the Union would pro-
bably have separated then., but the question was
compromised by consent of the opposition to the
admission of Missouri, and by a law dividing, by a
line of latitude, the rest of the territory then belonging
to the Union, slavery being excluded from the one
half and permitted in the other. A reaction followed
at the North against this dangerous spirit of inter-
meddling with the consciences and concerns of equal
sister States, and for about ten years Anti-Slavery was
at a low ebb. It then began to rally again in Puritan
New England, and mainly under stimulation from
Great Britain. From that time to this it has gone
on progressive and aggressive. The avowed eventual
object of its crusade was the abolition of slavery in
the Southern States ; beginning by agitating for its
abolition in all places under the Federal jurisdiction,
especially in the district of Columbia, and then, on
the acquisition of new territory, its prohibition in
aU such new territory; thus reviving, with a new
application, the old Missouri controversy. It soon
became bitterly denunciatSj^ and insulting. Slavery

£2

68 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

was to it the " sum of all villany." The Constitution
which recognised and protected it was a '^covenant
with death, and agreement with hell/'

All this, irritating as it was, not only in itself, but by
the unresting agitation of its menace, not only in the
press but in Congress, could not affect the Union, so long
as it remained confined to an insignificant party dis-
avowed by the immense mass of the population of the
North. It was counteracted by the cohesive infiuence
of the two great national parties, each cherishing
relations with their respective wings throughout the
South. But it became more serious as time went on,
and as the Anti-Slavery infiuence proved to be strong
enough, firsts to divide the Union between the orga-
nizations of great Church communions. North and
South ; secondly, to cause several Northern States vir-
tually to nullify, by actual legislation, the compact of
the Constitution for the rendition of fugitive slaves ;
and thirdly, to increase at every election the number
of abolitionists, and other shades of anti-slavery men
in both Houses of Congress.

Then loomed up, dark and menacing from the
North, the doctrines of a "higher law,'* and of
the " irrepressible confiict ; " proclaimed, not by
insignificant fanatics, but by important, shrewd,
and calculating politicians and party leaders; the
thunders of Anti-Slavery denunciation, denimcia-
tion involving both hate and threat, rolling mean-
while louder and louder over the land, from the
high central mount of the capitol. Anti-Slaveryism

UNION, DISUNION, AND RBUNION. 69

next takes the form of preliminary civil war, with all
its passions, on the representative arena of Kansas.
One of the two great national parties at last, its old
supreme leaders having now disappeared, drops its
Southern wing altogether; adopts the fatal idea of
sectionality, and aims at Presidential victory by con-
solidating the majority North on the Anti-Slavery
idea. The recognised head of that party is the apostle
of the " higher law," and of the " irrepressible con-
flict.'" It is but a sample of his political preaching,
re-echoed by powerful influences in the press, when I
quote from an address to a meeting of his party, that
*' slavery must be abolished, and you and I must do
it." It goes into the great national struggle of a Presi-
dential canvass, anti-slavery being its absorbing topic.
It is all but successful. Only the electoral vote of
Pennsylvania, by a bare majority, postpones the evil
day of the Confederation, ** cut clean across as with
a knife," -in moral disunion, by the triumph of the
North on the anti-slavery idea, and the menace of the
** irrepressible conflict," and abolition to be effected
by " you and me." The practical form taken by that
idea, is that of smothering slavery by accumulation of
the census growth of the black race within its existing
limits, until, preponderance of numbers shall l»^m>e
^ oranpg TorB^<» , and thus coerce either emanci-
pation or abandonment of the soil by the whites,
under peril of St. Domingo ; St. Domingo stimulated
by the hostile ascendancy of anti-slavery throughout
the neighbouring North. This is the mode and such

70 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

are means of accomplishment, not direct but deadly ;
not immediate but sure. The Supreme Court steps
in with the Dred Scott decision. " Down with the
Supreme Court ! *' is the only reply. " Away with
the constitutional right of Southern migration, with
Southern property, habits, and social and industrial
system, into even any portion of the future territories!'*
Even John Brown is all but deified by a large pro-
portion of the new anti-slavery party of the North.
Stimulated by so close an approach to success at the
first attempt, the mighty Republican party, thoroughly
amalgamated now with Abolitionism, renews the con-
test at the next Presidential election. Coincident
circumstances of distraction on the democratic side,
growing in part out of the excesses of our party
system above explained, and in part out of the agency
of a small disunion party at the South, which had
gradually grown into being as the natural responsive
reflex to Northern Protection and Northern Abolition
Disunionism,* help along the work of fate. The cut

* This Disunion party was never large at the South ; never even
considerable enough io avow itself, as did not a few of the repre-
sentative Abolitionists at the North. It increased rapidly, however,
in the interval between 1856 and 1860, after the dose approach of
Fremont to a sectional victory on the anti-slavery idea foreshadowed
the success of the second attempt in the person of Mr. lincoln,
whose evil fate reserved him for the thorny crown of the IVesidency
under such circumstances. Thousands undoubtedly vowed sincerely
in their hearts, as the Southern press loudly proclaimed, that they
would secede on the election of an Abolitionist by the North. The
very sweeping character of the Republican triumph throughout the
North aggravated it as a sectional provocation. A few real '^Dis-
unionists/7^ ^/' whose minds had become saturated with the idea

UNION, DISUNION, AND RKUNION. 71

is clean this time; clean, deep, and thorough. The
two main practical points of the Chicago platform
were precisely those, Protection and Abolition ; that is
to say, eventual abolition on the smothering plan» and
with the present bitter national insult of denying to
the South the right of all access by migration to the
common territorial property of the Union. Looking at
it fairly, impartially, and coolly, who can wonder that
revolution for separation immediately followed? and
followed as promptly as, according to the Southern
theory of the Constitution, it could be carried into
e£Pect, that is to say, through the State organizations
in the form of Secession ; Secession legally and fully
justified, according to the Southern conviction, by
Northern extreme violation of all the real compact of
the Constitution. It was not the mere election of an
obnoxious President, the mere success of an adverse
party. It was the spread of abolition sentiments in
the North— the menace of the ** irrepressible conflict"
to be carried out on the smothering plan ; the clean

that the sole safety of the South lay in independenoe, contributed
also undoubtedly to foment the diyision of the Democratic party at
the Charleston Convention, with the power always possessed by
Tehement men in the councils of an excited and excitable people.
The real evil was not in the few Disunionists, who were not indeed
either numerous or influential enough to constitute a '^ conspiracy,**
but in the general disaffection of the South, the slow growth of many
years of irritation and alarm. A single man can start into flame a
vast body already heated almost up to the point of spontaneous
combustion. The causes of alienation had been for years silently
acting like cumulative poisons in the human system. But the great
body of the chief men of the South, including those whose political
rank raised them at once to the leadership of the movement, neither

72 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

cut of sectional division, with all its natural conse-
quences of future alien and hostile domination now suc-
ceeding to fraternal confederation ; the coming danger,
the present profound national insult of the thing 1

I deplore, more than truth permits me harshly
to condemn, the conduct of the irritated, the exas-
perated South, in not having at least waited for

wished nor meant separation, even though they strove to prepare
their section in some degree for the possible eventuality of the civil
war which seemed a danger likely to grow out of the election of the
Republican candidate. Fixed in their conviction of the constitu-
tional right of their position in regard to the Southern right of pro-
perty in the territories, they were indeed inflexible upon it ; but
what they sought, even after they found themselves impelled by the
angry popular pressure from their States to the perilous resort of
secession, was the eventual recognition of their rights in the Union,
not a permanent separation from it. I could refer to various proofs
of this. I content myself with appealing to the now leading men
of the Confederate States themselves, and to the knowledge of their
sentiments possessed by not a few of their old democratic friends
and associates at the North. I have myself heard some of them,
even after the Rubicon was crossed, and there was for them no fur-
ther looking back, grieve deeply over that lost Union in which a
citizen of ^' little Delaware " stood in Europe the political equal of
the proudest noble of any of ** the great powers." No class of men
had a more intense admiration for, or attachment to, the Constitu-
tion, provided it were imderstood and administered aright, that is to
say, on the State-Rights theory of it, than all the men of what may
be called the Calhoun school ; but that very passionate love of it,
which involved love of the Union too, made them the more intolerant
of its perversion, and perversion into an instrument for wrong to the
South by the majority-power of the North. They are all traitors
now, of course, as I suppose I am too for thus speaking of them ; but
there is no finer body of men in the country or in the world, and woe
betide the day which shall seal our final dissolution of friendship
and fellow-countrymanship with those very men who are now
brutally threatened with the halter by a party at the North who
have been the real authors of all this devil's work of disunion.

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 73

another Presidential election. In that election we
should probably have utterly overthrown throughout
the North this Republicanized Abolitionism. Philip
sobered would have atoned for Philip mad with that
*' bad alcohol" of party above mentioned. Meanwhile
the South was still safe in the Senate, and in the sage
serenity of the Supreme Court. It had also its large
share of blame for the distractions whose consequences
had overthrown the democratic party. The Union
was well worth that further four years of patience,
bitter as was the insult, deep the wrong, alarming the
menace, flagrant the violation of the whole spirit of
the constitutional compact. Had Calhoun been yet
alive, he would have counselled thus to wait. But it
is always easy thus to reason calmly for others in such
situations of extreme irritation. A man under the
smart of his insblt must act, and wiU act, for himself,
and act at once. If he would always be persuaded
by friends, and by the wise and hopeful spirit of
Christian love, to wait foiur years to see if atonement
would not yet be made, the reign of ''peace on
earth" would indeed have come. The South is high*
spirited and proud; confident in its strength, clear
and fixed in its constitutional opinions. It had in a
thousand forms declared its determination in the event
of Abolitionized Sectionalism triumphing over it, even
in the person of Fremont, a native of South Carolina,
in 1856. It repeated it in the fullest forms of com*
mittal in 1860. The glove of scornful defiance of its
supposed impotence was flung in its face by the

74 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

Republican party in 1856. Again in 1860, and this
time the republican party became the North. It would
have been sage and Christian to wait to see if it would
be done yet a third time, before girding on the dread
armour of civil war, and civil war for the dissolution
of Washington's Union. But — I may be execrated
and exiled for it in my own section, or imprisoned
in Fort La Fayette, within sight of my own home.
I will nevertheless speak out the honest truth — ^my
sole wonder is that the entire South did not, within
three days after Mr. Lincoln's election, flash out in
one blaze of insurrection from Maryland to Texas.
That it did not is a signal proof of two things : —

1 . Of the instinctive American attachment to regular
legal forms and organized modes of political action,
causing them to wait for the action of their State
Governments, which they expected to proceed in what
they regarded as the legitimate constitutional way of
Secession justifiably repealing Accession.

2. Of a certain profound traditional and habitual
love of the Union, which still tugged at their heart-
strings ; a sentiment which long held in the Border
States ; which animated a considerable Anti-Secession
party in the very seceding States ; which even prompted
the parting words of some of the retiring senators
(Mr. Slideli for instance), addressed to the democrats of
the North, implying that that very course of necessary
self-assertion by the South was the true and the only
way of eventually bringing us together in a renewed
confederation adapted by reform for a real per-

UKIOK, DISUNION, AND EEUNION. 75

maiience— of reviving a phcBnix Union out of the very
ashes of the old one. It is upon this sentiment at
the bottom of the Southern hearty not yet, I trust, all
extinct, that I build now some hope of a Reunion not
yet quite impossible.

But it is manifest that, if we would even dream of
such reunion, the North must make up its mind to give
up, once for all and for ever, these two fatal mistakes : —

1. Unequal and unfair tariff taxation of the agri-
cultural South.

2. Intermeddling with the Southern slavery ques-
tion, whether by direct, or by not less offensive and
dangerous indirect' means, of attack upon it through
the machinery of the ^federal Government.

XIX.

To do this with effect, adequate amendment of the
Constitution is the only way. The amendment must
be such as to give an ample guarantee for the future.
And while amending the Constitution on those points
and for those objects, we ought to make the work
complete by adopting at the same time those modi-
fications of detail which experience has proved
necessary for the reform of that excess of party
spirit, that over-action of our great presidential parties,
and of that general demoralization of our politics,
which none of us can deny to have played a very
important part among the complicated causes which
have brought us to our present position.

76 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

Reform of our great parties, and of our politics
generally, is to be effected through the combined
action of three means : —

I. Reduction of patronage to the minimum, by not
suffering removal from offices except for just cause.

IT. Reduction of the Presidency, while preserving
all the executive vigour, responsibility, and national
dignity of the office, to an annual term.

in. More distinct definition of the Federal power
with a view to moderate the conflict of opinions be-
tween the two great schools or theories of interpre-
tation ; this more distinct demarcation being in the
direction of limitation of the Federal power, so as to
preserve everything requisite or useful for the purposes
of confederation on a large scale, while removing all
means for, and all inducement to, irritating interference
in the concerns of States or sections. The particular
amendments with this view being also threefold,
namely —

1. Guarantee to all sections of uniform fairness of
taxation, by prohibiting taxation, direct or indirect,
for the object of protecting* any local or sectional
interests at the expense of those of other sections;
the Federal revenue being collected purely on the

* If any State should want to stimulate by encouragement any
particular manu&cture within its borders, it will remain free to do
it either through loans or through boimties sufficient to aid the
nascent industry in its competition with that of foreign countries.
If its people will consent to such self-taxation, there would be no-
body else to object. But there is neither rhyme nor reason in their
asking other States to bear that taxation for them, in the form of

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 77

revenue principle for the payment of the public debt,
and of the expenses of the Government economically
administered.

2. In all places under the common Federal juris-
diction, recognition to citizens of the several States
coming thereto of all rights of property lawfully
existing under the laws of their respective States.

3. Provision for internal improvements to be made
by authorizing transit and harbour tolls by the States
with approval of Congress, to cover the cost of theii*
construction and maintenance, whether by single
States or by two or more locally concerned.

IV. And finally, in addition to the above, it would
be useful, though not necessary, to adopt a provision
for some high tribunal of the States, more solemn and
extraordinary than the Supreme Court, for the decision
of any question of the constitutionaUty of a Federal
law that should be formally brought in issue between
the Federal and a State Government.

If the North were now to present to the South the
Constitution amended substantially on these ideas, toould
not the latter return into the Union thus reformed —
call it the old or call it a new one, a>s you please ?

I do not ask what might be the first impulse
of men under passionate excitement. They might

prices increased by protective duties ; the more so as those protec-
tive duties operate upon the people of those other States with the^
twofold wrong — 1st. Of taxing them in the form of the enhanced
price ; 2d. Of damaging their foreign market for the productions of
their own industry. Protection may be very well under some cir-
cumstances, but not in the form of plundering Peter to " protect "
PauL At least Peter can hardly be expected long to submit to the
process.

78 UNION, DISUNION, AND RBUNION.

say, as some leading Southern gentlemen at an earlier
stage of this dread history are reported to have said,
that if the North should now give them a blank sheet
of paper to write their own terms, they would never,
on any conditions, return into the Union. The ques-
tion is the practical poUtical one. What would be done
m>w, or some months hence, in view of all the past, all
the present, and all the future ? Are not the induce-
ments pressing on both sides sufficient to overcome
all the- objections, undoubtedly existing on both, to
reunion by thia means ?

I am well aware of the full force of these difficulties.
They may be thus summed up : —

1. The only great Inaterial interests against it are
the tariff interest of the North, undoubtedly a great
power ; and, in minor degree, the internal improve-
ments interest of the West. The other difficulties are
of a moral nature. They are —

2. The old Southern hatred of " the Yankee,*' with
the superadded animosity against the North generated
by the war.

3. The Southern attachment to the constitutional
idea of the sovereign ^^ right of secession,'' as a
guarantee against abuse of majority domination; a
'^ right " fixedly regarded by the North as incompatible
with any solidity or reality of union.

4. The general repugnance of the people to touch
the sacred work of the Constitution with sacrilegious
hand of amendment ; and especially the repugnance
of the North to amend it at this time, until after full
re-establishment of its authority.

UNION, DISUNION, AND RBUNION. 79

5. The particular repugnance of the republican
political leaders to any adjustment by compromise,
which should seem to involve failure in their great
undertaking of crushing andJiumbUng the Southern
rebellion, as a vital party necessity to tAem.

6. The exasperation of the Abolitionists, and of the
anti-slavery party generally, at the thought of any
adjustment under which not only would slavery in the
South be placed beyond the reach of their indirect
attacks through the machinery of the Federal Govern-
ment. but may even hereafter extend into new territory.

Here is unquestionably a formidable, at first blush
a desperate, array of obstacles. Before considering
them in their order, and then ^finally the mode and
means of carrying into effect the proposed Reform and
Reunion — Reunion through Reform — let us first
suppose the Union thus reconciled and reunited on
some such basis as is above indicated; and then
tiy to imagine what would be the working of our
Confederate system thus regenerated. Probably its
contrast with our past experience, present condition,
and the dark and doubtful prospects yet lowering
before us, may suggest some stimulus to the effort
required for its realization.

XX.

On the reduction, amounting to substantial abo-
lition, of the evil of patronage (for the States would
soon imitate the good example of the Federal Govern-

80 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

ment in this respect), would necessarily follow a general
reform of our politics — purification and elevation of
their tone, and moderation of parties and party spirit.
I do not say that our great nationalp^tieswould
disappear ; but, no longer divided m^doctnne oetween
the State Rights and Consolidation schools, no longer
at issue on the great interests of Protection, and of
slavery and anti-slavery; no longer battling for victory
in great Presidential campaigns ; and, above all, when
no longer fighting for its "spoils," they would be
something very different, and much better than they
have heretofore been. The morbid fever of party
spirit would subside into the natural emulation of
healthy public discussion. Presidential or Federal
politics would no longer, in reversal of the proper
order, absorb those of the States. The Federal Govern-
ment would have no channels for its action of a nature
to arouse the excitements of great pecuniary interests
of sections or large classes at stake upon its policy.
The machinery of party politics would go very much
out of use. Political management and intrigue would
be much less influential to secure representative nomi-
nations for an inferior order of men. Party traders,
cultivating politics for its profits not always pure,
would have little inducement to stimulate them, and
few means of success. Men would be much more
independent of party discipline; and the right and
reason of every subject discussed would be much less
than now subordinated to the interests, passions, or
pledges of parties. The Presidential elections, from

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 81

the shortness of the tenure and absence of patronage,
would lose all that character of importance and ex-
citement which now keeps the country in a chronic
state of intermittent convulsions. A new steadiness
would be imparted to the general administration and
policy of the Government, which would no longer
depend on the alternate victories of great parties*
extreme in antagonism — ^victories of mere party and
party spirit, but would be directed, with insensible
gradations of modification, by the general mind of
the coimtry expressed in legislation, and simply exe-
cuted by a truly republican chief magistrate, and by
the great bulk of permanent and experienced public
officers. Political "claims" to office for services
rendered towards nominations and elections, would
enter for little in the selection of the few eniployea
whom any President would have to appoint, and
special qualifications, talent, and character, would
come to be the main reasons for selection. The
moral and intellectual tone of the whole government,
and of all our politics, would be raised. Removable
for cause alone, all officials, like the employes of
private establishments, would be under strong in-
centive to merit permanence by distinguished good
service and good character, instead of, as now, feeling
equally sure of continuance for four years, and of the
probable necessity of having to quit after the next
election.

There would be a happy end to the present
vicious relation of party inter-dependence between

82 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

the President and his " friends " in Congress, which
has gone far towards annulling that independence
designed by the Constitution to exist, as a vital
principle of political health, between the executive
and legislative departments. The one having no
patronage to bestow, whether on them or on their
recommended candidates, who are in turn their in-
fluential supporters at home ; and the other having
no power over an annual President through ability
to make or mar his administration by their support
or disafiection in Congress, each would be, as both
ought to be, truly independent of the other; and
higher and better principles of patriotic, rather than
party action, would alone enter into their counsels
and govern their conduct. With an end to all further
question and struggle about Protection, internal im-
provements, and slavery, would soon die out all the
old antagonism between North and South, nor could
any hereafter arise between any of the sections, when
the action of the Federal Government, truly limited to
confederate functions, could no longer be applied to
subjects calculated to generate any great conflicts of
interests or collision of passions. No disafiection of
any one towards the rest could ever arise in a con-
federation which could never wrong nor oppress any
of its parts, nor be charged with doing so — never
menace their future security nor ofiend their public
sentiment — never, indeed, interfere directly or in-
directly with their domestic concerns; and which
would be simply, to all alike, the means of majestic

UNION, DISUNION, AND EEUNION. 83

security and of a collective national greatness and
dignity which the smallest State would enjoy in the
fulness of the whole. If any unreasonable discontent
should ever arise in any single State, it could never
be other than temporary, just as in South Carolina
in 1831, before the pervading irritation on the sub-
ject of slavery had been superadded to that growing
out of the protective policy, the revolution then
incipient was soon smothered by the simple fact of
non -participation by the neighbouring States.

But it is . needless to carry further this feeble
picture of what would be the Union thus reformed,
revived and reinvigorated. This is all true, and
logically certain, extreme as may seem its contrast
with all that has been witnessed during our genera-
tion, under the working of those very defects in our
system which the argument assumes to have been
corrected. The noble theme grows on our thoughts
as they dwell upon it. Every one can carry it out to
its various and glorious developments. And how
easily might it all be converted, from this fond specula-
tion of hope, into a magnificent and substantial fact 1
One year would suffice, by effecting this reform of
our system, to secure all this blessing, not alone
to our own generation, but also to a posterity
swift -coming beyond all arithmetic. Into such
a true confederation as this, with true local self-
government combined with collective national great-
ness and power, the day would come when the
Canadian States, with the ready consent of England,

F 2

84 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

would be eager to enter, to say nothing of the
neighbouring islands and of those Mexican provinces
into which the rapid growth of our population must
necessarily spill over, and which would soon be ambi-
tious of admission into so beneficial a confederation.
To the possible and feasible extent of such a con-
federacy, once well established on the true princtplea
of confederation applied to the grand continental acale
of dimensions, there is no assignable limit. The
greater the extent — the more varied the climatic
conditions, the more complete the application of the
scientific principle of the division of labour through
the diversified characters of difierent forms and modes
of industry prevalent in difierent sections, and har-
monised by internal freedom of trade, uniformity in
all its machinery, and guaranteed peace and tran-
quillity — the greater only would be the gain of
collective prosperity and happiness to all and each,
and the stronger the attachment of all and each to
such a Union.

In this prospect of the Union regenerated out of
its present seeming death-throes, into all that our
highest hopes have ever imagined its future, cannot
indeed some stimulus be found to the efforts, and to
the sacrifice even of the prejudice, pride, and passions
of the day, by which, and by which alone, it may yet
be realized ?

UNION, DISUNION, AND BEUNION. 85

XXL

One thing is certain. Such a Reunion must be
voluntary, or it cannot be at all. A great effort of
magnanimity and of wisdom must be made, and made
on both sides. The North, as the stronger, and as
the majority party — let me add, as the side from
which proceeded the influences of irritation which
have generated a too excessive violence of resentment
on the other, namely, the Protective tariffs, the anti-
slavery agitation, and the sectionalisation of a dominant
majority— ought to take the noble and jatrjptii
initiative. Reconciliation must begin with
All spirit of vindictiveness must be discarded, as
basely below the level of the high occasion. Even
though it should not be worthily met with sympathetic
response of the Southern heart, it would be a grand
proceeding in itself. The proposed amendments to
the Constitution would be good and right in them-
selves, and essential to any long-continued permanence
of the Confederation, whether the South be brought
back into it or not. It would place the South very
much in the wrong if it should reject the tendered
right hand of such reconciliation, when proposed on
terms of full redress of past grievances and guarantee
against recurrence ; terms on which reunion recipro-
cally honourable, and therefore sincere and cordial,
could really take place. If the coercive policy bias
indeed left such a thing as a Reunion party in the
South, it would immensely strengthen and develop it.

86 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

It would create it if uone such yet exists. Even in a
political, nay in a mere military point of view, it would
be as sagacious a proceeding as in its higher aspects
it would be magnanimous. And if it is from the
North that it ought to proceed, it is only from the
North that it can be expected, or that it could with
any benefit proceed. The South has already reformed
its constitution to great advantage, committing only
the mistake of giving a long six -years' term to a non-
re-eHgible President. Any overture from the South
would wear the humiliating aspect of submission. It
is, in a word, impossible. The adoption by the North
of most of their undenied improvements in the Con-
stitution would be in itself a great step on the road to
reconciliation. If we should now add the important
further improvement of the annual term, and that of
a new special high court of Stateis to arbitrate disputed
questions of constitutionality between the two co-
ordinate sovereignties, it would be but perfecting the
work of amendment well begun by the South. Great
as are the difficulties in the way, with good-will they
are not insuperable, while the probable difficulties and
the certain evils to both sides which are involved in
non-reconciUation are in truth still greater. Properly
undertaken and properly carried out, I do not believe
that this sublime work of reconciliation would fail.
The blessing promised to the " peace-makers '* would
at least rest upon it.

This brings us to the consideration of the obstacles
in its way which have been above briefly indicated.

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 87

XXII.

1. The material one of the Tariff interest at the
North. The war debt settles that difBculty. That
debt is tariff enough for our day and generation ; «ot^
for ours alone, unfortunately. Every possible resource
of revenue must be tasked to the utmost to pay off
that debt; indirect as well as direct. Our tariffs
fmist be based on the revenue principle, to which the
South has never objected ; they must be adjusted to
the highest revenue scale on all articles, and must be
applied to all revenue-yielding articles without pro-
tective discrimination. And even independently of
that guarantee of a general high scale of duties, the
industry of the North has a higher interest in the
restoration and perpetuation of free trade with the
South, and in the prevention of that state of things
which would remain under two confederacies, jealous
and hostile at heart, than even in high duties under a
common tariff. This difficulty vanishes on inspection.
So, too, does the minor one of the Internal Improve-
ments of the West. It will be long before the Federal
Government can have any money to spend on such
objects. Provision musi be made for them by means
of State action, and concert of States locally interested,
with defrayment of cost by tolls sanctioned by Con-
gress. This system would always have been far more
efficient and productive than that of reliance on the
partial, reluctant, and disputed action of the Federal
Government. Mr. Douglas, the great representative

88 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

of the West, in his latter years was a full convert to
this system. He has freely so avowed to me, as I
believe he also did on the floor of the Senate. The
Confederate Constitution (Art. I. sect. x. 3) has wisely
adopted the same.

XXIII.

2. The old Southern hatred of "the Yankee,''
with the superadded animosity generated by the war.

The Southern contempt of "the Yankee" (partly
real and partly affected), in his assumed devotion
to the dollar, and deficiency in fighting quality, was
always very unjust and very absurd. The Yankee,
though full of ingenuity and perseverance to make,
cares no more for the dollar than does the Southerner,
or any other man of any other race. No man is
either braver or more unflinching than the Yankee in
a cause approved by his conscience and judgment, or
more capable of sacrifice for an idea. All this has
now been amply proved. His idea in this war has
been Country and Nationality ; as that idea has been
understood by him. The early military success of
the Confederate side of the quarrel tended to foster
the prejudice in question; and made it, perhaps,
indispensable that the fighting, once fatally begun,
should go on for a while until accounts were squared
on the bloody ledger of battle. But enough has now
been done to satisfy that condition for true and

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 89

cordial reunion. Both sides, henceforth and for ever,
whether as confederate fellow-citizens and brethren,
or as independent neighbours, will, at least, respect
and esteem each other, with the sympathetic senti-
ment always necessarily existing between brave men
who have borne themselves with equal and kindred
honour in mortal combat. The spectacle on both
sides has been magnificent, of bravery, of self-sacri-
fice for great ideas, or ideas held great, of grand
popular uprising, of perseverance in supposed duty —
magnificent on each side, doubly magnificent in its
national totality, as my heart, at least, clings to the
hope of being allowed to contemplate it. It presents
the terrible beauty of one's own house and home on
fire. Sad as has been the mutual calamity of this
great war, logically absurd on the whole while held
logically sound on each side, yet history will devote
to it one of her noblest pages as a grand evidence of
the capabiUties of a people under republican institu-
tions. Perhaps, in the career of nations, such passages
are, from time to time, necessary to spiritualize, to
ennoble and to purify the national life, too long stag-
nant in the tranquillity of peace and of excessive
material prosperity. We could not get it in foreign
war — ^geography and the pacific industrial character of
our system combined to forbid it ; perhaps civil war
was necessary as the only form in which it was possible
to us. Baptized at our birth in holy blood, perhaps
we had reached the age at which a second sacramental
confirmation was needed for our national salvation.

90 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

And then, as to the superadded war animosity
which would seem to have dug a yawning chasm of
hate never to be bridged with renewed fraternity of
fellow-citizenship. This may seem, but is not, hope-
less. The Swiss cantons have fought bitterly in civil
war — ^they were in hostile array, the confederacy
against a minority section, so late as about fifteen
years ago* — but yet there they are! Immense
interests press upon us, on both sides, towards recon-
ciliation. The nature of the case is such, unhappily,
that neither can yield, neither can suhnity but in
shame and disgrace. Therefore, neither will )deld,
neither mil submit. The common evil of the war
weighs, meanwhile, alike on both ; and to both on the
future as on its present. It is confessed that the North
could not wind up the war within the present sum-
mer, even with triumph, with a debt short of 1,000 or
1,200 millions of dollars. It is compelled to make
more overwhelming preparations to ensure military
success, because for it the war is in the enemy's far-
stretching country. At the same time it can better
bear its heavier, than can the South its lesser sacrifices

* It was in consequence of what was called the " Sunderbund
war " (or secession), which grew out of religion as ours out of anti-
slavery and party, that the Swiss Confederacy reformed its consti-
tution. They adopted substantially our model, but they had the
wisdom to keep clear of our feature of a semi-monarchical quadrennial
presidency ; adopting the wise arrangement already mentioned on a
previous page of an annual presidency, filled in rotation by the
members of a council representing the different sections of the Con-
federacy, and thus avoiding our monster evil and danger of great and
violent national parties.

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 91

in a war of home-defence. Both began the mutual
madness of the war with the belief that it would be
soon over, and that it would bring no great strain
upon them. The administration drew upon triumph
a confident bill at ninety days, without grace. The
South, on the other hand, never supposed that the
Democratic party of the North would go, or could be
led, into it, as has been the case, or that there would
be any such vast uprising of united and determined
popular energy. The fact has proved that unless
reconciliation, reciprocally and mutually beneficial,
can intervene, there can be no end to the war, short
of consequences, which thought sickens as it follows
out. It is one of those wars of equal woe to van-
quished and to victors.* Even success to the South

* William Pitt was unquestionably a devoted patriot, and the
incarnation of ** loyalty " as an Englishman. Tet he dared in June,
1781, to hold the following language in Parliament ; and, strange to
say, not only was he neither expelled from the House nor committed
to the Tower (the Fort La Fayette of London), though Parliament
was nearly two to one against him, and both king and people were even
more passionately convinced of the justice of their side of the quarrel
in the American War than are now our Government and people at
the North, but he was soon after Prime Minister, darling of the
sovereign, and idol of the nation : — ** A noble lord who spoke early
has, in the warmth of his zeal, called this a holy war. For my part,
though the right honourable gentleman who made the motion and
some other gentlemen have been moi*e than once in the course of
the debate severely reprehended for calling it a wicked or accursed
war, I am persuaded, and I will a€&rm, that it is a most accursed,
wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and diabolical war. . . .
The expense of it has been enormous, far beyond any former expe-
rience^ and yet, what has the British nation received in return ?
Nothing but a series of ineffective victories or severe defeats —
victories only celebrated with temporary triumph over our brethren
whom we would trample down, and defeats which fill the land with

92 UNION, DISUNION, AND BBUNION.

would leave it in a position incomparably inferior to
that it would occupy in the Confederation reunited
in the manner now advocated. On the other hand,
to the North, present conquest of the South would
put no end to the struggle, which would then, for a
while, only change its character. This is a '' conflict
of ideas," and battle is no arbitrament of American
ideas. Such victory would but embitter those it
humiliated. It would effect no real reunion. It
would be followed but by the temporary passiveness
of the overthrown wrestler, prostrate under the weight
of his heavier conqueror, till repose should have re-
newed his exhausted strength. Continued miUtary
occupation of subjugated, but implacably resentful
States, is simply absurd and impracticable for any
length of time, under our Confederate system, and in
our age of 9elf-govemment. Meconciliation is the
only solution ; and reconciliation implies a new basis
of fair adjustment, with reciprocal deference to each
other's position, and respect for each other's honour.
Reconciliation's incompatible with conquest. Who
wants future brotherhood with the man whom he has
forced to cower in degraded submission to his superior
power? But the equal friend with whom I have
fought^ even in deadly strife, in a cause regarded by
each as good and true, and each with the honours of

mourning for the loss of dear and valuable relatives slain in the
impious cause of enforcing unconditional submission. Where is the
Englishman who, on reading the narrative of those bloody and well-
fought contests, can refrain lamenting the loss of so much British
blood shed in such a cause, or from weeping on whatever side victory
might be declared ? " (Stanhopes Life o/Fitty voL i. p. 61.)

UNION, DISUNION, AND EBUNION. 03

kindred courage — ^with him I can afterwards reunite,
on terms of a more cordial friendship than ever
existed before, during the long period of the gathering
storm of our quarrel, provided it be terminated by
the manly embrace of a true reconciliation. Such a
reconciliation would be found in such a reunion as is
here proposed, on the basis, and the only possible
basis, of the Constitution reformed so as to redress all
past grievances, and to obviate their future recurrence.
The South equally with the North, the North equally
with the South, could honourably, cordially, nobly,
reunite on such a basis. God only grant that it may
be in the hearts and capabilities of both to do so 1
Eternal honour to both if they prove adequate to this
high and wise magnanimity ! Chiefest honour to the
one which shall take the initiative in it ; and it is
only, I repeat, from the stronger side that that initia-
tive can come with grace and with effect. Nor would
that initiative, if taken in the proper spirit and proper
mode, fail to win back to the Union that which no
victories by land or sea can ever recover, the heart of
the high-spirited and high-minded people of the
South — aye, even of South Carolina. Could the ghost
of the great Calhoun be raised like that of Samuel,
such, I am very sure, would then be his most earnest
counsel.

XXIV.

3. Still another difficulty in the way is the present
fixedness of the Southern mind upon the idea lliat the

94 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

self-protective '' right of secession " must exist under
any form of confederation ; while in antagonism to
this is the Northern idea that that '' right " is neces-
sarily fatal to all union, to all nationality, to all
political permanence. This *' right " conceded (argues
the Northern mind) converts confederation into a mere
rope of sand ; and in our confederacy it is the more
intolerable because of its geography, that is to say,
the physical relations of its States and sections which
cause certain States to occupy the controlling points
of ingress and egress indispensable to the industrial
life of others, such as the mouths of the Mississippi,
the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Chesapeake,
and the extreme Southern forts off the point of
Florida.

Such, I say, is the Northern argument ; and it is
sound, and one of the great points of this great ques-
tion. On the other hand, the Southern mind argues
that the Union includes equally the two twin ideas of
national constitution and of State compact ; that the
people of any State are bound to the one only so long
as the conditions of the other are faithfully and fra-
ternally observed ; and that the right of secession,
correlative to original accession, affords the only pro-
tection to the weaker States against* oppression by the
stronger. They refer to Massachusetts, when she felt
aggrieved, as having first taught them, and more than
once repeated, the doctrine, and to a Fennsylvanian
authority (Rawle on the Constitution of the United
States of the calm period of 1825) as having fully

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 95

sanctioned it.* This argument, too, is historically ^
true, and has its degree of political soundness. Still
the Northern one is at least as good, and a little better,
that is to say, better in the proportion of the relative
forces, inasmuch as the geographical relations above
mentioned do in fact exist ; have entered into the
reciprocal bearings of the compact upon the vital
interests of the parts, and, on the law of self-preser-
vation, the vast regions thus dependent on certain
commanding points cannot be expected without, at'
least, a fight for it to the last extremity, to allow them
to pass into alien, which the contingencies of the
future may transform into hostile hands. And this
argument has the more force because Louisiana and
Florida were not original parties to the compact, but
are States created out of territories subsequently
acquired by purchase by the whole Union, Even in
the extremest phase of the Southern theory, that of the
Constitution being a treaty and a mere treaty (treaties
often declaring themselves to establish perpetual peace
and amity), when one party chooses to regard a treaty
as broken by the other side, and therefore to declare
it at an end, the other party, disputing the charge of
having been the first to break the faith of the bond,
has the clear right to fight for it when essential interests
of its own are involved in it. Neither side has a
'* right of secession " from a subsisting treaty important

* *^ It was foreseen that there would be a natural tendency to
increase the number of States with the anticipated increase of popu-
lation. It was also known, though it was not avowed, that a State
might withdraw itself." (P. 297.)

96 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

to the other side. He may assert the might of seces-
sion if he believes himself justified by sufficient cause,
but it is under penalty of war. So that after all the
'' right of secession "' from a confederation, even though
regarded simply as the cancelment of a treaty or
compact, cannot in practical efiect be distinguished
from that right of revolution which is inseparable from
all forms of government. To quarrel over that **right"
is merely to dispute about words. The Montgomery
Constitution itself stipulates no such reserved '' right,"
and in the event of any State hereafter asserting it on
the ground of the purely compact character, as between
sovereignties, given unambiguously to that instrument
by its preamble, the case would stand simply on the
ground of a broken treaty. It would be simply a
question of expediency to the remaining members
whether to acquiesce or to " coerce." Coercion might
be, according to circumstances, the height of folly,
but it would be an undeniable political right.

The true solution of such a political problem, other-
wise insoluble except by the law of force, is to be
found in such a reform of the terms of the Confedera-
tion, of the political system established by it, as shall
prevent the possible occurrence of either of those
extremes which tend to collision, of any near approach
to either of such extremes. Give the Federal power
all the force necessary for the common defence, and
for the maintenance of those great common interests
of harmonious uniformity above indicated, but divest
it of any powers capable of being misused by dominant

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 97

majorities in a manner, or to objects, offensive and
oppressive to great minorities. This, and this alone,
is the golden rule, the true secret (it cannot be too
often repeated) of permanent confederation on a large
scale. The right of secession can never be recognised
in a compact of union any more than the right of
revolution in the charter of any form of government.
But both the one (tnd the other exist in human nature,
and must always exist in foro conscientia subject to
ultimate adjudication by the sword. They are, in
truth, one and the same ** right "' or the same wrong,
according to the result, secession in a confederacy
being simply a revolution of States. Political wisdom
consists in so adjusting reciprocal rights, and so
administering powers as to obviate any human pro-
bability of the occurrence of any of the occasions in
which the latent heat of public discontent pan ever be
developed into the conflagration of revolution, whether
revolution by an insurgent people under a consolidated
Government, or by the organized political powers of
States in a confederacy. And this is precisely what
is sought, and what, I think, would be secured by the
reforms now proposed in our own Confederation. If
any better adapted to the object, and with less varia-
tion from the old-established system, can be devised,
a National Convention^ assembling with a view to
Reunion through Reform^ will be the proper body to
suggest them. Its action would be supported by
every Northern State in spite of Abolitionism, in-
cluding Massachusetts, and would eventually be

08 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

responded to by every Southern one, including South
Carolina.

XXV.

4. This brings us to our next impediment, namely,
that general repugnance which has heretofore existed
to touching the sacred work of the firamers of the
Constitution with the presumptuous hand of amend-
ment ; and the especial repugnance of the North to
touch it, at this time, until after full re-establishment
of its authority. This veneration of the mere letter of
the Constitution has been carried into superstition.
The dread of touching it has grown out of the tradition
of the difficulty with which its compromises were
adopted. But that very fact was, in truth, pregnant
with a future necessity of amendment. Compromises
are essentially experimental. Results of conflict, they
involve the germs of conflict, as fruits are but seed-
vessels. A constitution of compromises perpetuates
in parties the original divergence of opinions. More-
over, our Federal Constitution has been already twice
largely amended. One of its prominent features, the
intended selection of the President by an electoral
college of supposed wise first men of the States, has
been from the outset practically subverted, in a manner
equivalent to a radical change. The framers un-
doubtedly meant to guard by that means against the
historically well-known danger to the public tranquillity
of popular election of executives with a long term

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 99

and great powers of office, approximating them to the
character of elective monarchs. That intention having
failed in practice, and that very danger having been
80 far realized that it is on that identical rock of
Presidential elections and Presidential parties that v^e
have split, it is now for us to resort to other means
(cancelment of the patronage and redaction of the
term) for attaining the same end. Again, most if not
all of the State Constitutions have been amended;
some of them more than once, and very extensively ;
though most of them had been framed with the
benefit of the Federal model, and in several cases- with
participation of the Federal framers. Time alone
could test the practical working of a system at once so
novel and so complex ; a Confederate system under-
taken in spite of the many historical failures of con-
federations. Time, time and growth, could alone reveal
the points of detail which might be expected to need
amendment. Instead of permitting superstition to ob-
struct progress and reform, our attention ought rather
to have been directed to the object of closely watching
its working with a view to amendments calculated to
perfect it, and to obviate approaching dangers. The
time has now arrived when it must be done. If a
certain pride in it, which was half vanity, restrained us
before, our pride is surely humbled enough now. If
fear of disturbing the slumbering lion of discord
between North and South, alas 1 we have now to tame
his awakened and all-bloody rage. Not having ex-
tinguished sparks, we must now put out a conflagration

o2

100 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

and insure for the future. The present state of thmgs
is one of the results of the practical working of our
system, a bad one going far to counteract many that
are good and glorious. It is only by adequate amend-
ments that we can remedy and prevent the recurrence
of the one, and secure the perpetuation and develop-
ment of the others. If Congress is inadequate to the
task, as a body too full of mere party politicians, many
of them unsuitable too to this high function, a national
convention of best men ought to assemble as soon as
possible. Though the seceded States would not of
course send representatives to it, yet if it should act
for the participating States alone, and should have the
Heaven-inspired wisdom to adopt the amendments
known to be those best adapted to the object of
winning back, to a renewed and regenerated Union,
the hearts and judgments of the South, it will
accomplish what miUions in arms might march from
Maine to Mexico without effecting.

Then as to the unfitness of the movement, for
amendments at this time. '' Hereafter, if you will,
but not now ! Let there be first complete triumph of
the Government, consummated victory in the war,
utter overthrow and prostration of the great rebellion
— ^its back broken — ^its spirit crushed — ^then, and not
till then, will be the moment for any proper amend-
ment of the Constitution:'' — such is the argument
sure to be made by many of the North who might
otherwise be well inclined towards the amendments
proposed. To them I answer, that the tremendous

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 101

determination already evinced by the North, the
tremendous development of energy put forth in support
of it, the vast superiority of power arrayed and ready
in reserve for that purpose, are quite enough to make
good the dignity and honour of the Government in
presence of the revolution opposed to it. The warning
lesson to future "rebellion," from whatever section,
stands complete enough as it is. The Federal Govern-
ment has sufficiently asserted ittolf. The sooner
pacification can now be made, the better. The prose-
cution of the war is costing the North between two
and three millions of dollars a day, and it is only just
entering upon its second period and phase, that of
campaigning carried down into the South proper.
Bad and vindictive passions at the North might be
gratified by forcing the South to drink to the lees the
cup of humiliation under conquest; but that very
process, besides all the other evils, perplexities and
dangers for both and for all that may be involved in
it, will but make more and more difficult, nay, at last
impossible, that real reconciliation of hearts and minds
without which there can be no true reunion worth
ten years' purchase. I do not ask that the war, now
that it has begun and has gone so far, should at this
moment be given up and replaced by conciliation. I
do not ask that the sword should be summarily
thrown away. I ask only that it be accompanied
with the olive branch of simultaneous and alter-
native conciliation. The approaching season of
necessary suspension to the actual fighting afibrds

102 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

an auspicious moment for it; and for a thousand
reasons, political, moral, and even military, such is
the dictate of true wisdom, of true patriotism, and
of true unionism.

And amnesty is no conciliation. Pardon, to high-
spirited men, is only the bitterest form of insult.
Something much more, something going much deeper,
must be done. A door must be flung wide open for
honourable return, if we would have them return at
all. The wrongs must be redressed. The rights
must be frankly recognised. The future must be
plainly and securely guaranteed. The demonstrated
defects of the Constitution must be amended. Thus,
and thus only, can there be reconciliation ; thus only
any restoration of the Union that shall be aught else
than a worse than useless mockery and lie.

For my part, indeed, I would that the war had
never begun ; or, if it had to be, that the combined
abolitionists and republican party politicians had done
all their own fighting, the Protectionists doing all the
paying ; the democracy of the North remaining free
and unembarrassed to do their proper work of re-
storing the Union. The conciliatory in lieu of the
coercive policy was the true one from the outset.*

* Lest this opinion should he deemed " treasonahle,*' I must
fortify the position with the following curious extract from a despatch
of Mr. Seward to the American legation in London, of the date of
April 10th, 1861, in which I take only the liherty of italicising —

''The President neither looks for nor apprehends any actual and
permanent dismemherment of the American Union, especially by a
line of latitude. He is not disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of
the South, namely, that the Federal Qovemment cannot reduce the

UNION, DISUNION, AND KBUNION. 103

Non-recognition of the seceded confederacy, abstract
assertion of the unchanged Union, abstinence from
the coarse sure to overload both sections vnth engr-
mous debt and enormous loss of propowy^ ^aTO^ai the
same time sure to place between the two a broad
abyss of blood— that, in my sorrowfiil judgment, to-
gether with amendment of the Constitution, was the
true policy at the outset. The reunion party would

seceding States to obedience by conquest, even although he were
disposed to question that proposition. But, in &ct^ the President
willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or detpatie Government
could subjugate thoroughly ditaffeeted and insurreetionarg members of the
State. This Federal Republican system of ours is of all forms of
government the very one which is most unfitted for such a labour.
Happily, however, this is only an imaginary defect. The system
has within itself adequate, peaceful, conservative, and recuperative
forces. Firmness on the part of the Government in preserving and
maintaining the public institutions and property, and in executing
the laws whose authority can be exercised without waging war, com-
bined with such measures of justice, moderation, and forbearance,
as will disarm reasoning opposition, will be sufficient to secure the
public safety until returning reflection, concurring with the fearful
experience of social evils, the inevitable fruits of fection, shall bring
the recusant members cheerfully back into the family, which, after
all, must prove their best and happiest, as it undeniably is their
natural home. The Constitution of the United States provides for
that return by authorizing Congress, on implication, to be made by a
certain majority of the States, to assemble a National Conventiouy in
which the organic law can, if it be needful, be revised so as to remove
all obstacles to a reunion, so suitable to the habits of the people,
and so eminently conducive to the common safety and welfare.
Keeping that remedy steadily in view, the President, on the one
hand, will not suffer the Fedml authority to fall into abeyance, nor
will he, on the other, aggravate existing evils by attempts ai coercion,
which must assume the form of direct war against any of the revolutionary
States."

This was all veiy wise and true, and it lightens in some degree
Mr. Seward's personal responsibility for the war, except in so fer

104 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

have remained stronger than ever at the South, and
Alexander H. Stephens would have been its moral
head. The hearts of half the Southern people would
have still been in the Union. Conciliation on a basis
of constitutional amendment, effectual to secure future

as he accepted the ''solidarity " of that responsibility by remaiiiing
in the cabinet after he learned that at thai very date the orders were
already in course of execution, which were sure to provoke the
opening of Beauregard's batteries against Fort Sumter ; that already
a secretly prepared expedition for the relief of Sumt^wason its
way, and that defiant notice of it had been sent to v&SmTRckens,
notwithstanding the written opinions of General Scott and all the
highest military and naval authorities that it was impossible to reach
Sumter with relief and notwithstanding the nearly unanimous vote of
the cabinet for its evacuation. Will the secret history of all this
mysterious manceuvring about Fort Sumter ever be known ? Mr.
Seward has since thought proper to publish this important despatch,
which now reads so strangely. Was it by way of a private protest —
a sort of stage aside — with a far-sighted view to the day when the ques-
tion should come up of the responsibility for the war, for its resulting
debt, with nothing left in the end to show for it, for all its blood
and hatred^-and for all the ulterior consequences when the North
will have to deal practically with the one or the other of the two
alternatives, either that of retiring exhausted from the impossible
task of thoroughly subjugating the South at home, or that of dis-
posing of the conquered South, then to remain on the hands of the
North like the elephant a man had the misfortune to win in a raffle ;
or like Mexico after we had so far conquered her as to destroy her
armies and take her capital, when, sorely embarrassed tcAat next to do^
we were only too glad to pay her a vast sum of money, ostensibly as
a price for California, already ours by the laws of war, but in fiict as
an inducement to a peace which should afford us a decent mode of
putting an end to the war ? Glorious as had been its battles, uniform
our career of success, utterly unable as was Mexico to renew the
hopeless contest, yet if the Mexicans had held out for twenty instead
of ten millions, we should probably have ended with paying it. We
give Mr. Seward the due credit for his somewhat tardy peace policy
then, on the 10th of April, though he is not the first wizard who
could no longer rule the storm which his own spells had raised.

UNION, DISUNION, AND BBUNION. 105

harmony, would have brought us together again in
two years, or at most after another Presidential elec-
tion. But Party willed it otherwise. Events hurried
forward on a different tack. Perhaps it was necessary
that our future generations should have a great lesson
of the consequences of over-action in the Federal
Government, of sectionalism in parties, of revolution
by irritated sections. Perhaps nothing short of this
would have sufficed to bring us to the point of re-
cognising the defects in our system, and the necessity
of so ainending them as to secure a great future of
purity restored to our politics, and of perpetuation
secured to the Union through the modifications now
become indispensable in order to adapt it to our
present and future scale of magnitude. Perhaps, too,
as already said in another form, a great providential
storm of convulsion, suffering, and patriotic passion,
with thunderings and lightnings, and earth washed
vfdth the tears of heaven, was needed in the moral
order of politics, to purify and brighten the atmo-
sphere of our national life, corrupted by too long and
excessive material prosperity. At any rate, we have
now again a fitting moment for Reconciliation, during
the necessary pause before next autumn's renewal of
the fighting.

XXVI.

5. The next impediment in the way, is the particular
repugnance of the Republican political leaders to any

106 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

adjustment, by compromise, which should seem to
involve failure in their great undertaking of crushing
and humbling the Southern rebellion, as a vital party
interest to them.

This is indeed a pretty serious difficulty, in view of
their present power at the North and in the Govern-
ment. Are not those Whig, now " Republican '* chiefis
of party, and politicians of all gradations, too deeply
committed to this, their war, to leave any hope that
they can ever consent to such a solution ?

Many of them will no doubt thus argue and act
accordingly. But on the other hand, the wiser heads
among them ought to think themselves fortunate to
get out of it so well. If they fail in the war, what
wiU become of them, with the responsibility upon
them for the murdered Union, and for the national
debt left as its monument ? And even if they succeed
in breaking down the armed revolution, what will
they then do with the South, subdued but un-
reconciled — nay, still more embittered by the humilia-
tion of defeat?

Permanent military occupation is absurd. The
political perplexities will only just begin, when the
military shall have been solved. As soon as the
fighting fever is over, and the work of reconstruction
of the Union shall have to be taken up in earnest, a
great reaction at the North must set in. The general
feeling will be that the democratic party alone can do
that work — that after the " beggar on horseback " had
ridden to where the proverb leaves him, a wiser rider

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 107

must mount to bring back the steed — that after the
snake of the fable has got into the cleft stick by having
trusted the tail with the lead, the head must now
resume its natural function of guidance. And again,
what will become of them ? That work will then
have to be done, if then possible at all, by means of
precisely some such constitutional reform as is now
proposed. The Republicans, as a party, will then be
sacrificed by the North to the reconciliation of the
Union, for there can be no reconstruction without
reconciliation. By frankly and patriotically uniting
with us now in the work of pacification through con-
stitutional reform^ they will remain in good position
in the renewed Union. Their work will stand open
to justification in argument as having been a^^legai^
necessity in its time, and an inevitable means of
leading up to the regeneration. In the new modera-
tion in our national politics and parties which will
result from the proposed reform, they will have their
full share in the common benefit of the new *' era of
good feelings/' But this is a petty branch of our
great theme. I willingly leave it to those whom it
concerns, trusting only that they will be wise in time.
If they stand in the way, the work must be done
vfdthout them, by the united hosts of uprising demo-
cratic party, in patriot firatemization with the more
conservative, the more magnanimous, and the more
truly Union-loving, non-politicians among the repub-
lican ranks.

108 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

XXVIL

6. I have reserved to the last the apparently greatest
of the di£Bculties in our way, the exasperation of the
Abolitionists, and of the anti-slavery party generally,
at the thought of any adjustment, under which not
only would slavery at the South be placed beyond the
reach of their indirect attacks through the machinery
of the Federal Government, but it may even hereafter
extend into new territory.

This influence we must simply beat down, as we
easily can whenever we can get before the people the
plain question of choice between it and Reunion. Its
strength per se was never more than that of an adopted
wing of the great presidential party, to the whole of
which, however, it was able to impart its own apparent
character, just as a little wine will colour, or a little
infusion embitter the whole glass. There is already a
decided disintegration of the ** conservative *' from the
" radical " portion of the Republican party. If the
approaching Disunion had been realized by the North,
anti-slavery would have carried very few of the States
at the last election. It would have very little real
power against Reunion at another. The four millions
of negroes can neither be exported nor left emancipated
on the Southern soil at a moment when Northern
States are passing fresh laws against the admission of
blacks or mulattoes within their borders. They have
made no response to the opportunity of self-assertion

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 109

99

afforded them by this war.* Republican '' radicalism
is perfectly logical when it insists on emancipation as
the only alternative to reconciliation, that reconciliation
which it consistently abhors. But emancipation is
impracticable. All Republican Conservatives, even
including (it is said) Mr. Lincoln, are against it. The
very arch-advocate of coercion in the cabinet has
recently written the declaration of his ''moral cer-
tainty ** that " to free the slaves of the South without
removing them would result in the massacre of them.'"
Yet that removal is flatly a physical impossibility.
There is no available machinery of transportation
adequate to such an exodus. A few thousands, or a
few tens of thousands, might be deported, with tears
and curses against their own meddlesome "friends,"
but the natural growth would meanwhile exceed that
diminution. And as for the cost of such exodus by
navigation — the North is going to stoop and groan

* This 18 freely confessed by the Northern press. A recent
Philadelphia paper says that ''the fact that no advantage was taken
of the opportunity exhibits an apathy, and a strange aversion to
freedom, on the part of the negro race." Mr. Thurlow Weed's own
paper says: ''He (the negro) has not manifested that alacrity to
embrace the opportunity for freedom which we had anticipated. . . .
We counted upon insumotions — ^teirible and wide-spread insurrec-
tions—among the servile population, as an inevitable and almost
immediate consequence of a war between the Government and the
secessionists. . . . But the result we anticipated has not come
to pass. Slavery, so far from being an element of weakness,
has been an element of strength to the rebels. The blacks have
fitiled, except in a few cases, to embrace the opportunities of freedom.
They have fidled as a dass to prove that they very ardently covet a
change of drcumstanoes."

110 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

sufficiently under the load of the debt incurred in
coming up to this point ; and it will never superadd
to it the further burthen of deporting the slaves of the
South, destroying in the act one of the miedn founda-
tions of its ovirn industrial and commercial prosperity.
The South has the ** fixed fact '* of these four millions
of an inferior race, occupjring towards the superior
race, in point of relative intellectual power, about the
relation existing between the generation of children
and that of adults in any homogeneous community.
The whole social and industrial system of the South
now rests upon it, is inseparably blended with it, and
the whole public sentiment of the South sustains it.
They believe that existing relation^HnmNl which involves
protecting and guiding control on the one side, sub-
mission on the otheiM^hich is called slaveryrto be
ethnologically necessary between two races, thus dis-
tinct, and thus placed in a juxtaposition from which
there is no escape. It is not merely the limited
number of actual owners of slaves who thus sustain it.
All the manifold ramifications of society and industry,
associated in the common life of the country, do so
equally. The slave interest at the South is not less
thoroughly and inseparably incorporated with the
whole complex structure of the social and national life
than is the land interest at the North. If there is or
can exist anything on which the all but universal
public feeling and opinion of a people are at once
united and intensely and vitally sensitive, it is the
institution of negro slavery at the South, with the

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. Ill

exception of a few border or mountain spots where it
may be said scarcely to exist. The dream of ever
coercing the South into its aboUtion, or into any sub-
mission involving its abolition, is the merest madness
of midsummer.

Now, at the North, AboUtionism and parly spirit
have attempted to take this great social problem out
of the hands of those whom it alone concerned, and
out of those of the Almighty Creator of men and Ruler
of nations — the present fratricidal war is the sad
result of their presumption. They must be content to
restore it to the slower, but surer, and wiser, guidance,
of that Divine Omnipotence. They must learn the
first principles of the poUtical science of confederation.
They must be content to rule, in the fear of God, their
own household, without intermeddling with those of
their neighbours who happen to be associated, in poli-
tical partnership for other common purposes, with them.
Their irritating agitation once at an end, for want of
points of jurisdictional contact with the slavery of the
South, and of consequent conscientious responsibility
about it, the question, as a Southern social and econo-
mical one, would resume its normal character and
course. If England does not like negro slavery, she
can give up that profitable industrial and commercial
partnership with it which makes her to the full as
much responsible for it as is any slave-owner in South
Carolina. Nothing easier, if she is willing to pay for
principle and sentiment, as she is so anxious that
other people should do for her principle and her senti-

112 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

ment.* So too can New England, with all her cotton-
mills, navigation, and thousand-fold mechanical pro-

* I do not mean to say that England has not *'paid^ Bomething.
She paid twenty millions sterling for her West India emancipation.
But the addition of 20 to 800 millions of the National Debt^ an
addition easily voted by gentlemen in Parliament when pressed by
a home agitation, and dealing with other people's slaves and paying
for them with other people's money, was a bagatelle of merit of
which a great deal too much has been made. So, too, England sup*
ports her fleet on the African coast for the suppression of the slave-
trade. But she has to employ the great navy, which it is her system
to maintain, and it is her policy to develop the great growing tnule of
the African coast. All this philanthropy is at once cheap and showy.
England gets more than its cost in self-glorification. If she was
really in earnest about it, why has she not stopped the slave-trade
by closing to it the ports of Cuba, its only market? Blockade
of Havana, Cadiz, and Barcelona would have done it effectually
long ago, and this reproach has been often retorted to her on this
subject. Her right imder her treaty with Spain is unquestionable.
But motives of political convenience were in the way. In this
matter of our American slavery, England is as much a partner as
though she held the titles of property in the slaves, and as though
her public officexis went out to the cotton-fields every morning as
overseers. It is maintained by a triple partnership, between the
South which produces the cotton, and the North and England which
carry and work it up. It is absurd to throw on one member of the
great firm the sole moral responsibility of the business jointly car-
ried on. The only difference between them is that the one main-
tains it thinking it right, and the other two in spite of thinking it
wrong. I prefer the position of the former. True, it would be a
great sacrifice for England to give up the cotton, a great sacrifice to
her commerce, her manu&ctures, her revenue, and I do not claim
that she ought to make it. Only I do claim that she ought not
to make sham pretences of moral superiority over those who are
able to raise the cotton only because she is eager to buy it from
them. I have a great respect for the English people, and there is a
great deal of goodness, enlightenment, truthfrilness, integrity and
philanthropy in them. But I deny their assumption of superiority
over us in this matter; and I prove my respect for their manly
love of fair play, by thus calling things simply by their right
names.

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 118

•

ducts for the Southern market. Meanwhile, when
slavery should be taken out of politics, and the South
left tranquil and secure to appreciate it and to deal
with it on its own merits and its own truths, political,
social, economical, ethnological, and moral, its solution
will work itself out in nature's own way. By the
reform proposed, there will be no artificial stimulus to
its propagation, no sectional political interests, no
great parties anxious to promote its e^ctension as a
means of power in the Confederation, whether for the
sake of ascendancy, as charged against the South, or
of self-defence, as asserted by itself. Undisturbed
by outside interference, unmixed with politics, pre-
sidencies, and patronage, the great principles of
right and of truth, through which Providenc^ works
out in human affairs the true policy of nature,
will have fair play and free scope. Whether, then,
confirmation of the present Southern belief in the
natural fitness and goodness of the slavery of the
inferior to the superior race shall be the result — or
ultimate termination of it on self-conviction, through
some gradual and voluntary process— or modification
and mitigation of the institution, through further do-
mestic guarantees, education, and serf-attachment to
the soil — ^the Almighty will better direct than either
John Browns or Chicago platform politicians. The
great truth for the North to learn is that we are a
confederation as well as a nation, and the former as
much as the latter. If we woidd remain the latter,
we must not forget that we are also the former. The

H

1 14 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

former character involves as its indispensable condition
toleration of diiferences, equality of rights, and reci-
procity of respect. We have now a simple choice to
make between a vain and impracticable Abolitionism
and the grand reality of Reunion. Let but the people
of the North, I repeat, get a fair chance for a clear
vote upon that choice — and they will get it at the
next Presidential election, if not before — and I have
no fear of the summary and sweeping result.

XXVIII.

So much, then, for the obstacles in our way. They are
many, they are great, but they are not insuperable. The
alternative evils and dangers of persisting in war and
war done are still greater to both sides. The South
hopes to tire out the North, as England was tired out
by the Colonies in the Revolution. But it took seven
years for that result. The outlet of the Mississippi and
the Gulf are of importance too vital to the North- West,
the commercial connexion of the South too important to
the whole North, for the latter to give up the struggle,
once thus begun, till after an exhaustion that years
alone can produce.

If any foreign powers should intervene, now that
the Northern harbours are impregnable to all the
navies in the world, by means of Iron and great guns,
it would but kindle hotter and higher the flame of
the war passion.

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 115

Ruinous to the North, this will be still more so to
the South. The Southern ports might be relieved
from blockade, and the Northern troops be compelled
to abandon their points on the coast, but the war
would rage for years by means of invading armies and
river flotillas. There would be no peace and no pros-
perity throughout the South. Further and further
the exasperation and the necessities of war would
impel the Northern Government in the direction of
tampering with slavery. It is needless to advert to
the position of the Southern cotton monopoly at the
end of several years of such war.

The North meanwhile would suffer little less in
interrupted prosperity, and Feliop piled upon Ossa of
public debt. When all organized military resistance
on the part of the South should be broken down by
defeat in the field and by occupation of the com-
manding points, capitals and rivers — when even the
worse warfare of vanishing guerilla bands shall have
come to an end — and sullen passiveness shall have
succeeded, what kind of government can be main-
tained over the Southern States ?

Can they be governed like Hungary, or Venice, or
Poland ?

How can they be forced to elect senators and repre-
sentatives to Congress ?

How can the Federal taxes be levied in commu-
nities where no one will buy or bid at tax sales P

How can the official machinery of the Federal
Government be made to work, amidst a population

116 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

where every man will be a personal enemy of every
Federal functionary, where the women will not speak
to them, and where the children will tell them to
wait till they are grown ?

This social atmosphere of hate as a repellant force
will be stronger than all the armies now in the field.
Apart from the cost and the other causes of imprac-
ticability, it will be morally impossible before the
public opinion of the world, before the very reacting
conscience of the North, to maintain such government
in the teeth of our own fundamental axiom that govern-
ments "derive their just powers only from the consent of
the governed.*' And this under the forms of republican
confederation ! Reconciliation will then have become
impossible. It is not yet so. But the opportunity is
flying. Every day of war, mere war, fierce, vindictive,
and coercive in spirit, besides its accumulation of debt
and suspension of commerce, increases enormously
the difiiculty of this task, to which, nevertheless, the
North must needs come at last.

XXIX.

In revising this letter, I omit much that had been
written in reproach of the faults and follies of both
sides ; of both the Republicans and the Democratic
party at the North, of the Administration, and, on the
other hand, of the South. All that, is better now
omitted. It is not parties nor men that I desire, now

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 117

uselessly, to attack. The whole chaos of confused
right and wrong has -grown insensibly out of the
working of a system; a system whose influences have
created and moulded parties ; given them their doc-
trines, characters, tendencies, and passions ; and en-
tangled us all in complications in which different
parties, with equal honesty and kindred patriotism,
have seen opposite duties, and have thus pressed on,
or rather been pressed on, farther and farther into
situations in which all have worked together, though
in antagonistic action, to destroy the Union, to soak
with hlood its once peaceful fields, to accumulate pub-
lic debt which the sweat and toil of many generations
will be hard tasked to pay, and, worst evil of all, to
embitter the minds and hearts of millions against
milUons, section against section, to a degree which
constitutes the hardest part of the problem now to be
solved. I repeat that what I blame is that which 1
may call our excessive party system^ not the men nor
the parties; the system which has divided us into two
great schools of doctrine — which has generated our
two huge national parties in perpetual violent struggle
for the prize of the Presidency and the patronage —
which has so deeply corrupted our politics, in spite of
the really universal leaven of patriotism. The defects
in the Constitution to which these results are clearly
traceable, these are what I wish to see reformed, as
they could be, easily and effectually. And we are
precisely now at the point at which that reform, while
good in itself, and necessary for the future permanence

118 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

of any large confederation among us, is precisely
adapted to the object of serving now as a basis for
honourable pacification, and for a true and cordial
reunion. On the basis of such a reform and such a
reunion as is here feebly advocated, deep as are the
feelings and the convictions which prompt the humble
effort, we can all afford to give and take reciprocal
amnesty for the errors, the political crimes if you will,
of the wretched past ; errors and crimes more the fatal
fruits, I repeat, of a system, than any results of evil
meaning or evil intention. And on that ground, wiser
and better though sadder men than before, we may
all meet again in the renewed fraternity of a common
nationality and common patriotism.

XXX.

A few words in conclusion will suffice to indicate
the mode of proceeding adapted to bring about this
blessed consummation.

If Mr. Lincoln indeed would take up the idea of
Reconciliation on the basis of Constitutional Reform,
he, with the mighty powers of the Presidency, could
do more towards it than any living man, or combina-
tion of men ; and thereby, as the Regenerator, write
his name in history side by side with that of the
Father of his Country. But this is too much to hope
for. My only hope is in the Democratic party of the
North, acting in unison with the Conservative Repub-

UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION. 119

lican real friends of the Union. I do not call upon
them to relax their support of the war, since they are
now iu it, but during the course of the coming summer
there roust be a practical suspension of active hostili-
ties in the hot South. Within that time, by proper
effort, may be developed a manifestation of public
sentiment and opinion at the North by which the real
work would be done, and its result^ assured, even in
advance of those forms of legislative action which
would then remain necessary to carry them into
effect.

Let the Democratic party, fused with the Conservative
Republicans into a Reunion Party ^ take the ground of
conciliation by means of reform ; reform adequate for
redress and guarantee. Let it insist on the policy, not
of driving the South back into the Union at the point of
the bayonet, but upon that of opening wide the door
of opportunity and invitation to honourable and volun-
tary return, through this sole adequate means towards
that result.* Let it insist upon the assembling of a
National Convention for the amendment of the Consti-
tution, with a view to honourable reconciliation. Let
it consolidate itself upon this position with unanimity
and determination. Let it agitate this question with

* It would even be a wise act (though I do not go so far as to
propose it) to give the public pledge that if, ten years after such
Reunion on the basis of the Constitution reformed, the South should
still desire separation^ and manifest that wish by some peaceful and
constitutional mode, it should not then be opposed with force, satis-
factory guarantees being furnished for the free navigation of the
Mississippi, &o.

120 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

thorough public discussion in every Northern periodical
and meetings in every Northern village, and then
make this the single great issue of all the elections of
the summer and autumn. Let one uniform monster
National Petition to Congress be signed throughout the
North in favour of a National Convention for Recon-
ciliation. If such a course should be carried out with
the vigour and combination of effort requisite to suc-
cess, its results would compel the Administration and
its party in Congress to concede the great point of the
National Convention.

No matter though Sojuthem papers or representative
persons should in the meantime declare that it would
all be of no avail, and that under no circumstances,
on no terms, on no reform of the Constitution, would
they ever return into reunion with ns. Such declara-
tions are to be expected. The real question will be.
What will the Reunion party at the South feel, and
think, and do, after this basis shall have been furnished
by the North, for it to stand upon and develop and
assert itself upon ; nay, what will the very ultra anti-
reunion party at the South itself do, when they shall
be pressed between the practical alternatives of such
reunion and indefinite continuance of the war? Let
the good work be but well and fully done on our
side, and I have no fear of the ultim'ate result on the
other.

If this great manifestation on the part of the Demo-
cratic-Conservative-Reunion party of the North can
but be developed through the course of the coming

UNION, DISUNION, AND RBUNION. 121

summer, so as to produce the hoped-for results in the
autumn elections, especially those of the State legis*
latures, an armistice would then necessarily follow till
after the meeting of the contemplated National Con-
vention.

After such an armistice, no further drop of blood
would flow again. The reconciliation once secured in
the minds and hearts of the people, its legal consum-
mation by accession of all the States, North and South,
one after the other, to the reformed Constitution, would
inevitably follow. Then indeed would the Union stand
firmer and grander, and safer for all time than ever
before.

A Central Committee of Reconciliation and Reunion
on the basis of constitutional Reform in the city of New
York, suggests itself naturally as the most ready and
efficient mainspring of such a movement, to start and
propagate it by addresses to North and South, and by
correspondence for the purpose of stimulating the self-
creation of affiliated committees in all the other States,
counties, cities, and towns of the North. Some better
mode of action may be suggested, or may indeed have
been already initiated, by others among the many
thousands at the North whose minds and hearts must
have been deeply stirred with impulses, analogous to
those which have prompted this humble effort.

I have ventured, my dear General, thus to address
to you this letter; though having no other grounds
for counting on your sympathy and concurrence, with

122 UNION, DISUNION, AND REUNION.

some, at least of its ideas, except those derived from
the memory of those better days of our country, when
we were both accustc med to view public affairs in the
light of the same general principles — eadem ^entire de
republica. What I have written, out of my deepest
convictions and deepest feelings, may be ineffectual
for any good ; may indeed pass unheard amidst the
thunderings of civil war and the fiercer clamours of
its passions. Detained away from home in a foreign
land, to my own inexpressible regret, by circumstances
constituting a compulsion absolutely insuperable, this
is all that it is in my power to do of a citizen's duty for
the good of his country, in this hour of her bleeding
agony.

J. L. O'SULLIVAN.
Lisbon, Maiy, 1862.

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